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Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
It's obviously more efficient for the general economy and trade to have half your population working than sitting around at home doing nothing productive and no amount of "traditional values" or desires will change that basic fact.
Even history, despite the poor conceptualizations of it among many nowadays, does not refute it. Women historically did work plenty, they just didn't do it at a typical job. Almost all of the "women's work" nowadays is the easy baby casual mode difficulty of what they had to do back then. Doing laundry manually is exhausting and that's despite our understanding of detergents and cleaners being better (a lot of women would burn their hands from the lye and not know better). Cooking and handling food before refrigerators, modern preservatives and supply chains that help keep the food fresh even before you get it and widespread electricity (and thus appliances) is quite difficult. Clothes were way way more expensive and that's if you could even buy them (during the Great depression things were so bad you might even make clothes out of flour bags) and thus sewing wasn't a relaxing hobby but a time intensive necessity so your kids had functional clothing. Even many of the lower noblewomen, who might have a few servants but not many, had a fair bit of of work to be done. And of course many of those servants were women too.
The modern tradwife stereotype is a fiction, one created by automation and modern supply chains. Women were spending their days doing work and being productive, it's just work that isn't needed nowadays.
Historically, a lot of women’s work took place inside the household economy rather than in the formal labor market. That kind of domestic production, cooking, childcare, clothing repair, food preservation, was productive but largely untaxed. When labor shifts into formal employment, it becomes taxable income, increasing the overall tax burden on households.
Higher taxation reduces disposable income, which can make raising children more expensive and is often associated with lower fertility rates in developed economies.
Because of this, maximizing the number of people in the formal workforce isn’t automatically better for families or demographics. You need a high postive money or "energy" inflow for a natural system to be able to reproduce, same physics applies for humans.
The idea of taxation suppressing productivity and income is obvious, so obvious that it is a basic tenet of economics.
In theory yes, in practice almost half of US households don't pay an income tax to begin with. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/
They might pay some other forms of taxes like social security, but they aren't paying an income tax. And even then, most of it is still just the high earners who already make so much that the taxation isn't suppressing things in the same way it would with someone poorer.
Now this isn't true both because the premise isn't real but also the obvious part that if working wasn't meaningfully more beneficial than staying at home and watching TV, people would stay at home and watch TV. The idea that it isn't better is disputed by the chosen actions of the everyday American.
I agree that focusing only on income tax probably doesn’t capture the full picture. A more useful way to approach the issue is to look at the overall cost of living and the net resources households actually have available. Housing, childcare, healthcare, education, and other expenses can place a significant burden on families regardless of whether their income tax liability is high or low.
Regarding the second point, my argument is simply that reproduction in any natural system requires a positive inflow of resources. For humans, that translates to having sufficient financial stability to support children, and for most people: maintaining a desired standard of living. People have different expectations for quality of life, and most are not willing to significantly lower their living standards just to have one or more additional childeren. I would argue that if families could maintain their current social and economic position while experiencing an increase in disposable income, many would be more inclined to have more children.
Fundamentally, modern capitalism rewards childless women with status--higher incomes, more prestigious jobs, bigger homes, more fame and attention. If you're status-maxxing in the modern world, then family is an impediment to success. This competition favors women who eschew femininity and childcare, and so women predisposed as such increasingly set the pace in the status race. Other women, even those who merely seek to settle into the middle of the pack (to feel "normal"), marginally shift their priorities and goals in the same direction as the childless workaholics. This extreme shift in the female status hierarchy is relatively recent, and it is unsustainable over multiple generations for obvious reasons.
Children are a public good that is being under supplied because women now have fewer ways to internalize the benefits in the short run. Status is not the only motivation to supply public goods, but it's a big one, perhaps the biggest, and it is likely necessary to get over the hump of replacement fertility rates.
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