Re: pronatalism, I think the problem is fundamentally that most self-identified pro-natalists hold other political positions that preclude them from advocating for the most effective and humane methods of encouraging people to have children—stuff like “more affordable housing”, “shorter work weeks”, and “having the government pay parents a wage”.
I agree totally with OblivionNecroninja. To summarize, it's hard to be ruggedly self-reliant when you're 22. Much easier if you're 50 and you've got a good job. No trouble at all if you're a boomer living off your 401K . . . with Medicare, no less.
BTW, during the vest sweep of human history, 22-year-olds were never expected to be self-reliant. They were most often employed in the family business, whether that was farming or blacksmithing. Indeed, it is speculated that menopause arose within the human species (not present in apes) so that older women could use their long-life experience in gathering food and caring for grandchildren. From an evolutionary perspective, postmenopausal women are all about their grandchildren. Of course, now that we are not in a desperate survival situation we can branch out. Me included!
Thanks for the clarification! I wasn’t expecting you to change your post—I figured I was experiencing that ambiguity because of personal weirdness (someday I’ll write a whole-ass article about how I Personally was screwed by changing communication norms and societal hypocrisy around snark, hyperbole, ineffective threats, and general irreverence—largely because I expect at least some other Millennials have had the same experience).
Matt Yglesias distinguishes his pro-natalist approach from others in One Billion Americans on the basis of advocating for more pro-family policies, in the sense that you mean.
I'm definitely in favor of slow population growth, but I thank the stars above that the US will never get to one billion. Growth has slowed decisively all over the world.
The only reason for any woman to have six children (unless she really wants them) is the fact that most of them might die, and your children were in fact your Social Security. I once figured out that out of my family of 6, only one parent and one child would have lived past 30 In the pre antibiotic era—in other words, before WW II.
I’ve heard the phrase “one billion Americans” exactly once before and that was in a pro-immigration context. And was multiple years ago.
I suppose that says more about my media environment than it does about One Billion Americans (or Matt Ydontcare), but I typed all that before my introspection kicked in, so I’m sending it anyway.
One Billion Americans by MY is a pro-US-population expansion policy, one that he claims can only be achieved with strong pro-natalist policies regardless of immigration policy.
The answer to the question of "how did having kids become a political issue" is surely just the invention of effective birth control, right? For most of human history, if you wanted to have sex, you were pretty much forced to accept a high risk of pregnancy. Different social structures have dealt with this in different ways (ranging from early marriage to infanticide), but the facts were the same.
We've only had a generation or two to adjust to an absolutely unprecedented change in human reproduction that brought it (imperfectly, granted) under conscious control. Combine that with economic and cultural shifts that make it more possible for a single woman to thrive economically and all of a sudden what used to be an unavoidable fact of life is now a venue for human choices--and hence necessarily political.
Probably. It's striking though that the departure from and political conversation around having kids parallels suburbanization and the cultural abandonment of cities for a long time/for much of the population. I'm trying to see if there's a common thing there.
It's not a part of the political conversation because most people think it's a well-settled issue. It's only a discussion that dirty hippies have. (I'm a dirty hippy in this case.)
Mary Harrington has written about this and I’m currently going through her book-length treatment of Feminism Agains Progress. She draws both the changing role of women in society after the Industrial Revolution which first removed men from the home in either a trade, or farming and then industrialised all women’s work except caring (both of children and the elderly). And then the pill solved the ‘problem’ of this move by making caring work optional (more or less).
While not central to your essay, it's reasonable to like things you have never experienced. It just requires some moral imagination.
But I don't think Vance's critiques are far outside norms in terms of substance. What's striking about them is the vitriol. Most people holding these views would be more polite toward their interlocutors. We have been bombarded with the alleged moralizing influences of housekeeping, parenting, and closed-nuclear family residing in detached dwellings in the suburbs. While nobody would deny that parenting is a necessary aspect of society at-large, the pro-parenting advocates claim that parenting is personally transformative in a beneficial, pro-social way. They are claiming that you are defective for not having a romantic mate, you are defective for not having children, and by not starting your own family, you miss out on the socializing effects of parenthood. I don't know how these ideas poll, but I have heard people making these claims throughout my life, from conservatives and liberals.
So I think that a clear-headed analysis of Vance on substance does not set him so far from a set of very American, present-day norms. But he is very mean about it, and that may explain the disgust with his comments. Second, liberals started off disgusted with Vance personally for as long as he has been in public life.
Though I absolutely agree that pro-family, pro-natalist arguments ought to be encouraging people to have kids in a positive way (i.e. not haranguing folks who don't have kids) -- I think it's unfair to say that J.D. Vance's comment was sexual. As a woman, and having lived in a major Northeastern city among the college-educated, and worked in an "intellectual" industry dominated by women... I've known and been friends with liberal, young and middle aged women who are, indeed, childless cat ladies (or dog ladies, as the case may be): Women who are investing all of their maternal instincts in politics, or into turning their work into politics, and putting the rest of their energies into their pets. What Vance said struck me as a true comment, not a vicious one. Though the people he's talking about (he specifically cites politicians like Harris, AOC, Buttigieg) certainly merit some meanness for policies they advocated for during the pandemic that harmed a lot of families and kids (as another commenter helpfully pointed out, these comments were made in 2021).
I'm a bit Anti-natalist. There were enough humans some time ago. In 1800, world population was only around 1 billion. Now, people panic at the idea of "declining birth rate" as if we will run out of humans as the number passes 7 billion. People advocating for positive growth do not do so out of altruism. Its a way of controlling people--politics. Pro-natalists who don't pay attention to the math are just ignorant. Especially so of the pressure put on people to breed. It can be difficult to get doctors to agree to sterilize a young person. Many have stories of being refused, even if the young person is male.
Trying to help people find low cost housing and the ability to raise a child and make a living is something everyone ought to support. The Child-Free would benefit just as much. The Natalists can be enabled without demonizing those who want nothing to do with it. The true divide is politics, those who prefer no economic help to the poor, and the pro-natal extremists. We know which politics they hide behind. These worst elements will demand no help for the family hopefuls. As accelerationists tell us, to force revolution, you have to make things get worse. Only when people are desperate will they make deals with devils.
Thats why Vance and the Project 2025 seek to turn people against each other. Zealotry starts with purges.
This does feel like a "last great problem" for economics - how does a functioning economy make the transition to a world of more-or-less steady state population. As a former biologist I've long wondered about how humanity makes the turn from constant growth, given that carrying capacity is a cornerstone of ecology. For all the people who dunk on Paul Ehrlich, his underlying principle is sound. Human population can't keep growing forever. Either we reach a stable state or grow until we suffer a catastrophic crash.
Here is my recent comment on the transition in median income housing from the private market to government support.
Since our country was founded, housing has been 100 percent entrusted to the private market. When the government got involved in housing, it was primarily public housing destined for the bottom 10% of the population. No one likes to think of themselves as belonging to "that group/those losers." Second, in the last few decades developers have learned that they can get a higher rate of return on their investment by building for the upmarket.
Accordingly, the private market simply isn't building for the median quintiles. As you say, our national environment has changed, and it seems we can no longer entrust this aspect of our national life to private enterprise.
This will be quite an adjustment to make, easily on the level of realizing we could no longer entrust the healthcare of seniors to the private market. In the 1960s, the AMA called Medicare “socialized medicine.”
Thus, I suggest that we give a rebate (percentage to be determined) to every significant housing project aimed for the median market (hundred units or more). But this money is only for completed and inspected projects!—it is not seed money. Seed money can easily be stolen.
The private market is not truly private any more. The interference of onerous regulations at every level (from local zoning laws to state “climate-friendly” regulations, to federal prohibitions on logging and everything else under the sun) are a big reason small builders can’t build anymore — and only the largest corporations are making it through the forest of regulations, and making $$$ off it. Completed and inspected by who? We’ve seen how well those inspectors handle every other government department under the sun. The same large builders working hand in glove with city, state and local governments for “redistributed” dollars won’t solve the problem.
Isn't every single building built in a city in the United States inspected to acquire a “certificate of occupancy?" Why should this be more burdensome? You seem to belong to the government can never do anything worthwhile camp. Governments did build the interstate highway system. Right now, in Houston, we're enlarging it massively— four lanes becoming 8. One off ramp lane becoming two.
I am not part of the “government can never do anything worthwhile” camp. I am pointing out that your defining most of the U.S. housing market as "private" is incorrect. This hasn’t been a private market for decades. As for the interstate system — not the example I’d pick for worthwhile government projects in our country. The way the interstate system was implemented in the United States destroyed thriving towns and (minority) neighborhoods all over the country. County, city, state, and federal government all have a role to play in building strong towns, cities, etc. I just think that calling for more regulation and redistribution of funds in the housing market, rather than cutting the voluminous amount of red tape, is not a viable solution for this particular problem.
Two things. First, I agree and appreciate you vocalizing the thoughts and feelings of someone who is recently engaged and is about to attempt to buy a house and try to start a family listen to Vance. Specifically the experience of looking at him and the justifiers and ask "Is this Pro-Natalism/family thing for me, if these are the advocates for it and if this is their message?" I believe deeply that Pro-Natalism/Pro-Family-ism and abundance deserve better advocacy and advocates than this.
Second, do you see any tie-in with your previous piece about "misery as merit" - I am thinking specifically of "No Pain, No Game". Would love your thoughts about it!
JD Vance was trying to elevate the status of parents by diminishing the status of childless people. You could argue that’s the wrong approach, but I think in theory it’s probably a good idea to make being a parent higher status in society. Status-seeking seems like a primary distraction from child bearing and it’s leading us into economic depression
It is not so that cities choose liberalism from the menu card. It is so that what liberalism itself IS, is a product of the city, it is the city written large, it is running a country like a city. 500 years ago cities had citizens, outside cities, there were only subjects.
In the city, everything is artificial, planned, engineered and can be re-engineered at will. In the city, man feels like a collective god who can create or change anything, the city is man's self-creation.
Out in the country, well you can scratch the surface and plant wheat in, but mostly it is Nature, not man made, unchangeable, unchanging, not under man's control. And it looks so majestic, one feels such an awe and power (power in the rural storm for example) that it is thinkable that it was made by a higher power. The rural are religious because they are in awe of nature and feel small and feel there is something big out there.
I'm surprised by all these commenters blaming COVID lockdowns and policies on childless people?? Where do you get that idea? My recollection is that the people who wanted lockdowns, initially, was virtually everyone, and then after a month or two it was mostly old people or people with health problems, who were scared. I know the parents were upset about schools being closed but what makes you think it was somehow childless people doing this to you?? Every pro-lockdown, anti-opening person I knew back then was either a mom or they were retirement age.
I am childless and therefore hang out with lots of other childless adults, and COVID literally had no effect on us at all, so mostly none of us gave a shit either way. We were not the ones demanding schools stay closed, why would we want that?? If anything, it was profoundly annoying, how suddenly there were all these teenagers out on the hiking trails, playing their goddamn music out loud, when previously we were able to hike in peace with our dogs.
I agree that increasing the housing supply in centres of economic activity should be a public policy priority, but I don't think a wider perspective supports the claim that it would by itself solve the problem of declining birth rates (if declining birth rates are indeed a problem - this is why it is a political issue that can't be dismissed because JD Vance said something mean about women). For example, Tokyo has not seen the same staggering increase in house prices as a city like London has, but look at Japanese birth rates! Historically, economic development and especially an increase in women's autonomy and education has predictably led to a decrease in the birth rate - and most people would agree that this decline was good up until a point, but now the question is whether this has gone too far - and if it really is only a matter of economics or of culture as well. From a global perspective, the problem could theoretically be solved by migration from high birth rate to low birth rate countries, but an increase in vocal anti-immigrant sentiment on the right (which is of course to be deplored) suggests that this won't be a smooth process by any means.
It's fair to wonder what's happening to us when bearing children becomes a calculation of its economy or viability in the modern hour. Are we not the spawn of times past that were desperate or cruel or disorderly, times of war, dislocation, deprivation, and worse? Were not children sought as a sign of blessing and promise, not because conditions were just right? Let's have children again!
Near as I can tell the only pro natalist policy that pencils out long term is abolishing social security. Social security in effect privatizes the costs of raising children and socializes their benefits (future earnings). Standing in the way of my argument, the Catholic Church has managed to support non trivial numbers of childless people through the labor of productive people.
I notice a few quite angry comments about the "childless cat ladies" involvement with school closings. Two points. First, at least where I lived parents with young kids were some of the most insistent voices for school closings, mask requirements, etc. So it wasn't just the childless. Second, I'm good friends with two childless cat lady(OK, one doesn't have a cat) teachers, and I notice that you and conservative politicians were very willing to risk THEIR lives and health in favor of your kids' education. Small wonder we now have teacher shortages in many places; if I was a teacher being treated like cannon fodder in what became a culture war I'd have got out too.
Lots of things about the COVID year didn't go as well as we would have liked, but COVID was the scariest epidemic of my lifetime - and I say that as a guy who trained to be a microbiologist.
You should know as a microbiologist that covid was never a threat to your cat lady teacher friends. They just wanted an excuse to “work” remotely. Heaven forbid they be on the frontlines like all the blue collar proles. Heaven forbid they have a sense of duty.
Oops, forgot about this, but since COVID came up in another Addison post let's talk....
As a microbiologist I know no such thing. Most of my teacher friends were mid-age or older, so on the more "at risk" side of the disease/death curves. Further, many had elderly relatives and friends in their age range. And that old aphorism about kids being little germ factories has a lot of data behind it, and that included COVID. Just because they didn't always get very sick doesn't mean they didn't spread the virus.
Also, excuse? No teacher I've met, at any level, liked teaching remotely. None of them liked teaching over the internet vs being in front of their kids, none of them thought it was going well. But, reference the above paragraph.
Finally, the classism just drips. If you want a sense of duty it cuts both ways. Teachers had a duty to teach, not die (or kill friends/family) as cannon fodder for the desire of their local or state governments to pretend nothing was really wrong. I understand that having kids at home was hugely disruptive; I spent a month helping my granddaughter with remote learning. That doesn't mean that teachers weren't in danger from being in the classroom. You don't have to value teachers, and they don't have to teach in your school system. Good luck with that.
Re: pronatalism, I think the problem is fundamentally that most self-identified pro-natalists hold other political positions that preclude them from advocating for the most effective and humane methods of encouraging people to have children—stuff like “more affordable housing”, “shorter work weeks”, and “having the government pay parents a wage”.
I agree totally with OblivionNecroninja. To summarize, it's hard to be ruggedly self-reliant when you're 22. Much easier if you're 50 and you've got a good job. No trouble at all if you're a boomer living off your 401K . . . with Medicare, no less.
BTW, during the vest sweep of human history, 22-year-olds were never expected to be self-reliant. They were most often employed in the family business, whether that was farming or blacksmithing. Indeed, it is speculated that menopause arose within the human species (not present in apes) so that older women could use their long-life experience in gathering food and caring for grandchildren. From an evolutionary perspective, postmenopausal women are all about their grandchildren. Of course, now that we are not in a desperate survival situation we can branch out. Me included!
Self-reliance is greatly exaggerated. In some sense, we are all alone, but most successful human activity is a collaborative effort.
Having trouble reading tone over the internet—is this intended as rebuttal or as agreement?
Because something about the tone feels rebuttal-like to me, but all the content is stuff I agree with.
I only ask because I fear that I may have made my initial comment poorly.
please note the revision of my comment.
Thanks for the clarification! I wasn’t expecting you to change your post—I figured I was experiencing that ambiguity because of personal weirdness (someday I’ll write a whole-ass article about how I Personally was screwed by changing communication norms and societal hypocrisy around snark, hyperbole, ineffective threats, and general irreverence—largely because I expect at least some other Millennials have had the same experience).
Please don't apologize. Clarity is one of my top three values. And I'm always ready to provide more of it.
Matt Yglesias distinguishes his pro-natalist approach from others in One Billion Americans on the basis of advocating for more pro-family policies, in the sense that you mean.
I'm definitely in favor of slow population growth, but I thank the stars above that the US will never get to one billion. Growth has slowed decisively all over the world.
The only reason for any woman to have six children (unless she really wants them) is the fact that most of them might die, and your children were in fact your Social Security. I once figured out that out of my family of 6, only one parent and one child would have lived past 30 In the pre antibiotic era—in other words, before WW II.
I’ve heard the phrase “one billion Americans” exactly once before and that was in a pro-immigration context. And was multiple years ago.
I suppose that says more about my media environment than it does about One Billion Americans (or Matt Ydontcare), but I typed all that before my introspection kicked in, so I’m sending it anyway.
One Billion Americans by MY is a pro-US-population expansion policy, one that he claims can only be achieved with strong pro-natalist policies regardless of immigration policy.
The answer to the question of "how did having kids become a political issue" is surely just the invention of effective birth control, right? For most of human history, if you wanted to have sex, you were pretty much forced to accept a high risk of pregnancy. Different social structures have dealt with this in different ways (ranging from early marriage to infanticide), but the facts were the same.
We've only had a generation or two to adjust to an absolutely unprecedented change in human reproduction that brought it (imperfectly, granted) under conscious control. Combine that with economic and cultural shifts that make it more possible for a single woman to thrive economically and all of a sudden what used to be an unavoidable fact of life is now a venue for human choices--and hence necessarily political.
Probably. It's striking though that the departure from and political conversation around having kids parallels suburbanization and the cultural abandonment of cities for a long time/for much of the population. I'm trying to see if there's a common thing there.
It's not a part of the political conversation because most people think it's a well-settled issue. It's only a discussion that dirty hippies have. (I'm a dirty hippy in this case.)
Mary Harrington has written about this and I’m currently going through her book-length treatment of Feminism Agains Progress. She draws both the changing role of women in society after the Industrial Revolution which first removed men from the home in either a trade, or farming and then industrialised all women’s work except caring (both of children and the elderly). And then the pill solved the ‘problem’ of this move by making caring work optional (more or less).
While not central to your essay, it's reasonable to like things you have never experienced. It just requires some moral imagination.
But I don't think Vance's critiques are far outside norms in terms of substance. What's striking about them is the vitriol. Most people holding these views would be more polite toward their interlocutors. We have been bombarded with the alleged moralizing influences of housekeeping, parenting, and closed-nuclear family residing in detached dwellings in the suburbs. While nobody would deny that parenting is a necessary aspect of society at-large, the pro-parenting advocates claim that parenting is personally transformative in a beneficial, pro-social way. They are claiming that you are defective for not having a romantic mate, you are defective for not having children, and by not starting your own family, you miss out on the socializing effects of parenthood. I don't know how these ideas poll, but I have heard people making these claims throughout my life, from conservatives and liberals.
So I think that a clear-headed analysis of Vance on substance does not set him so far from a set of very American, present-day norms. But he is very mean about it, and that may explain the disgust with his comments. Second, liberals started off disgusted with Vance personally for as long as he has been in public life.
Though I absolutely agree that pro-family, pro-natalist arguments ought to be encouraging people to have kids in a positive way (i.e. not haranguing folks who don't have kids) -- I think it's unfair to say that J.D. Vance's comment was sexual. As a woman, and having lived in a major Northeastern city among the college-educated, and worked in an "intellectual" industry dominated by women... I've known and been friends with liberal, young and middle aged women who are, indeed, childless cat ladies (or dog ladies, as the case may be): Women who are investing all of their maternal instincts in politics, or into turning their work into politics, and putting the rest of their energies into their pets. What Vance said struck me as a true comment, not a vicious one. Though the people he's talking about (he specifically cites politicians like Harris, AOC, Buttigieg) certainly merit some meanness for policies they advocated for during the pandemic that harmed a lot of families and kids (as another commenter helpfully pointed out, these comments were made in 2021).
>cities—humanity’s default mode of settlement for millennia
Default my ass. Before modern agriculture, 90% had to be peasant-farmers.
I'm a bit Anti-natalist. There were enough humans some time ago. In 1800, world population was only around 1 billion. Now, people panic at the idea of "declining birth rate" as if we will run out of humans as the number passes 7 billion. People advocating for positive growth do not do so out of altruism. Its a way of controlling people--politics. Pro-natalists who don't pay attention to the math are just ignorant. Especially so of the pressure put on people to breed. It can be difficult to get doctors to agree to sterilize a young person. Many have stories of being refused, even if the young person is male.
Trying to help people find low cost housing and the ability to raise a child and make a living is something everyone ought to support. The Child-Free would benefit just as much. The Natalists can be enabled without demonizing those who want nothing to do with it. The true divide is politics, those who prefer no economic help to the poor, and the pro-natal extremists. We know which politics they hide behind. These worst elements will demand no help for the family hopefuls. As accelerationists tell us, to force revolution, you have to make things get worse. Only when people are desperate will they make deals with devils.
Thats why Vance and the Project 2025 seek to turn people against each other. Zealotry starts with purges.
This does feel like a "last great problem" for economics - how does a functioning economy make the transition to a world of more-or-less steady state population. As a former biologist I've long wondered about how humanity makes the turn from constant growth, given that carrying capacity is a cornerstone of ecology. For all the people who dunk on Paul Ehrlich, his underlying principle is sound. Human population can't keep growing forever. Either we reach a stable state or grow until we suffer a catastrophic crash.
Here is my recent comment on the transition in median income housing from the private market to government support.
Since our country was founded, housing has been 100 percent entrusted to the private market. When the government got involved in housing, it was primarily public housing destined for the bottom 10% of the population. No one likes to think of themselves as belonging to "that group/those losers." Second, in the last few decades developers have learned that they can get a higher rate of return on their investment by building for the upmarket.
Accordingly, the private market simply isn't building for the median quintiles. As you say, our national environment has changed, and it seems we can no longer entrust this aspect of our national life to private enterprise.
This will be quite an adjustment to make, easily on the level of realizing we could no longer entrust the healthcare of seniors to the private market. In the 1960s, the AMA called Medicare “socialized medicine.”
Thus, I suggest that we give a rebate (percentage to be determined) to every significant housing project aimed for the median market (hundred units or more). But this money is only for completed and inspected projects!—it is not seed money. Seed money can easily be stolen.
The private market is not truly private any more. The interference of onerous regulations at every level (from local zoning laws to state “climate-friendly” regulations, to federal prohibitions on logging and everything else under the sun) are a big reason small builders can’t build anymore — and only the largest corporations are making it through the forest of regulations, and making $$$ off it. Completed and inspected by who? We’ve seen how well those inspectors handle every other government department under the sun. The same large builders working hand in glove with city, state and local governments for “redistributed” dollars won’t solve the problem.
Isn't every single building built in a city in the United States inspected to acquire a “certificate of occupancy?" Why should this be more burdensome? You seem to belong to the government can never do anything worthwhile camp. Governments did build the interstate highway system. Right now, in Houston, we're enlarging it massively— four lanes becoming 8. One off ramp lane becoming two.
I am not part of the “government can never do anything worthwhile” camp. I am pointing out that your defining most of the U.S. housing market as "private" is incorrect. This hasn’t been a private market for decades. As for the interstate system — not the example I’d pick for worthwhile government projects in our country. The way the interstate system was implemented in the United States destroyed thriving towns and (minority) neighborhoods all over the country. County, city, state, and federal government all have a role to play in building strong towns, cities, etc. I just think that calling for more regulation and redistribution of funds in the housing market, rather than cutting the voluminous amount of red tape, is not a viable solution for this particular problem.
Great work Addison.
Two things. First, I agree and appreciate you vocalizing the thoughts and feelings of someone who is recently engaged and is about to attempt to buy a house and try to start a family listen to Vance. Specifically the experience of looking at him and the justifiers and ask "Is this Pro-Natalism/family thing for me, if these are the advocates for it and if this is their message?" I believe deeply that Pro-Natalism/Pro-Family-ism and abundance deserve better advocacy and advocates than this.
Second, do you see any tie-in with your previous piece about "misery as merit" - I am thinking specifically of "No Pain, No Game". Would love your thoughts about it!
JD Vance was trying to elevate the status of parents by diminishing the status of childless people. You could argue that’s the wrong approach, but I think in theory it’s probably a good idea to make being a parent higher status in society. Status-seeking seems like a primary distraction from child bearing and it’s leading us into economic depression
>cities are liberal
It is not so that cities choose liberalism from the menu card. It is so that what liberalism itself IS, is a product of the city, it is the city written large, it is running a country like a city. 500 years ago cities had citizens, outside cities, there were only subjects.
In the city, everything is artificial, planned, engineered and can be re-engineered at will. In the city, man feels like a collective god who can create or change anything, the city is man's self-creation.
Out in the country, well you can scratch the surface and plant wheat in, but mostly it is Nature, not man made, unchangeable, unchanging, not under man's control. And it looks so majestic, one feels such an awe and power (power in the rural storm for example) that it is thinkable that it was made by a higher power. The rural are religious because they are in awe of nature and feel small and feel there is something big out there.
I'm surprised by all these commenters blaming COVID lockdowns and policies on childless people?? Where do you get that idea? My recollection is that the people who wanted lockdowns, initially, was virtually everyone, and then after a month or two it was mostly old people or people with health problems, who were scared. I know the parents were upset about schools being closed but what makes you think it was somehow childless people doing this to you?? Every pro-lockdown, anti-opening person I knew back then was either a mom or they were retirement age.
I am childless and therefore hang out with lots of other childless adults, and COVID literally had no effect on us at all, so mostly none of us gave a shit either way. We were not the ones demanding schools stay closed, why would we want that?? If anything, it was profoundly annoying, how suddenly there were all these teenagers out on the hiking trails, playing their goddamn music out loud, when previously we were able to hike in peace with our dogs.
I agree that increasing the housing supply in centres of economic activity should be a public policy priority, but I don't think a wider perspective supports the claim that it would by itself solve the problem of declining birth rates (if declining birth rates are indeed a problem - this is why it is a political issue that can't be dismissed because JD Vance said something mean about women). For example, Tokyo has not seen the same staggering increase in house prices as a city like London has, but look at Japanese birth rates! Historically, economic development and especially an increase in women's autonomy and education has predictably led to a decrease in the birth rate - and most people would agree that this decline was good up until a point, but now the question is whether this has gone too far - and if it really is only a matter of economics or of culture as well. From a global perspective, the problem could theoretically be solved by migration from high birth rate to low birth rate countries, but an increase in vocal anti-immigrant sentiment on the right (which is of course to be deplored) suggests that this won't be a smooth process by any means.
It's fair to wonder what's happening to us when bearing children becomes a calculation of its economy or viability in the modern hour. Are we not the spawn of times past that were desperate or cruel or disorderly, times of war, dislocation, deprivation, and worse? Were not children sought as a sign of blessing and promise, not because conditions were just right? Let's have children again!
Man that closing paragraph cuts me deep
Near as I can tell the only pro natalist policy that pencils out long term is abolishing social security. Social security in effect privatizes the costs of raising children and socializes their benefits (future earnings). Standing in the way of my argument, the Catholic Church has managed to support non trivial numbers of childless people through the labor of productive people.
I notice a few quite angry comments about the "childless cat ladies" involvement with school closings. Two points. First, at least where I lived parents with young kids were some of the most insistent voices for school closings, mask requirements, etc. So it wasn't just the childless. Second, I'm good friends with two childless cat lady(OK, one doesn't have a cat) teachers, and I notice that you and conservative politicians were very willing to risk THEIR lives and health in favor of your kids' education. Small wonder we now have teacher shortages in many places; if I was a teacher being treated like cannon fodder in what became a culture war I'd have got out too.
Lots of things about the COVID year didn't go as well as we would have liked, but COVID was the scariest epidemic of my lifetime - and I say that as a guy who trained to be a microbiologist.
You should know as a microbiologist that covid was never a threat to your cat lady teacher friends. They just wanted an excuse to “work” remotely. Heaven forbid they be on the frontlines like all the blue collar proles. Heaven forbid they have a sense of duty.
Oops, forgot about this, but since COVID came up in another Addison post let's talk....
As a microbiologist I know no such thing. Most of my teacher friends were mid-age or older, so on the more "at risk" side of the disease/death curves. Further, many had elderly relatives and friends in their age range. And that old aphorism about kids being little germ factories has a lot of data behind it, and that included COVID. Just because they didn't always get very sick doesn't mean they didn't spread the virus.
Also, excuse? No teacher I've met, at any level, liked teaching remotely. None of them liked teaching over the internet vs being in front of their kids, none of them thought it was going well. But, reference the above paragraph.
Finally, the classism just drips. If you want a sense of duty it cuts both ways. Teachers had a duty to teach, not die (or kill friends/family) as cannon fodder for the desire of their local or state governments to pretend nothing was really wrong. I understand that having kids at home was hugely disruptive; I spent a month helping my granddaughter with remote learning. That doesn't mean that teachers weren't in danger from being in the classroom. You don't have to value teachers, and they don't have to teach in your school system. Good luck with that.