Governments worldwide are trying to increase fertility with cash. But the most famous birthrate "boom" had a lot to do with science and technology, as well.
To me the biggest piece that is missing today is optimism. They were riding high on a wave of American exceptionalism and a belief in making a better world. Today's young people wake up every day with a sense of dread and uncertainty. If we want people to have kids they have to believe in the world and what it will become.
Loved this read - definitely advanced my previous thinking. Another direction we have to point technology to is not only the fertility to produce more babies, but the day to day support to raise these families in this modern context. Beyond the paid leave policies and childcare and the cost of families lies the realities of what it takes to be a dual working couple literally trying to make each week work.
We’re in need of a second family industrial boom - one that relieves women of the heavy administrative load and that invites men and other caregivers in, on their terms.
This isn’t just about “dividing up work” more fairly, but “disappearing” work that is making having kids seem undoable for many young women. As you pointed out, much of the boom followed a cultural model of desirability. We need the same again but entered around the very real mental load that’s a specific side effect of our digital age.
I wholeheartedly believe that the right science and tech can unlock new family possibilities by lifting these real burdens in new ways but the mental load can’t be “gadgetized” in the same way so it’ll take creative ways to solve.
Great post. I think like with everything in demography, the answer is very complex and counter-intuitive. In the US, the spread of household appliances has for sure contributed to the baby boom. But in Poland for example, common household appliances didn't become popular until decades later, yet the baby boom still happened.
To the question from the last paragraph - "can it happen again?" - I think we already know the answer. The US went through another, albeit much more muted, baby boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. After dropping like a stone in early 1970s and staying there for two decades, fertility rates jumped almost overnight by 10-15% in the late 80s and stayed there until the 2008 financial crisis. And again, it was common among all groups, not just because of increased Hispanic population in the US.
The more potent question is why. And I think I'd go back to my original observation that the mid-century baby boom happened everywhere, regardless of development level of countries. So what else could drive it? And as much as I dislike this answer, I have to say - it's probably religiosity. Religious people have more children nearly everywhere on Earth.
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of weakened religiosity. Then the Great Depression has drawn people back to churches and temples and the result was more babies. Similarly, in the late 60s, religiosity has declined significantly in the US and a depression in births followed but then the religious right counter-acted achieved its peak between late 80s and early aughts, which coincided with higher birth rates.
That second smaller baby boom is interesting also because it only happened in the US - it did not have an equivalent in Europe. Not surprisingly, back then the US was a significantly more religious country than Western European ones.
The Gen X joke is that we were raised on hose water and neglect. So, from that perspective, it does look from the outside that raising kids now takes a heck of a lot more cultural time, energy and money. Parents aren't done at 18 anymore either, with "kids" being well in to their 20's before leaving the nest.
Jonathan Haidt makes a pretty convincing case that kids need a lot of unstructured play where they run around and act like kids with minimal (but not zero) adult supervision.
Kids don't need to be doing activities every second of everyday. Get rid of the travel teams, put down the screens go outside and play
Great article. I very much think that one key to the fertility rate is early family formation. If we put off that family formation because say the cost of getting your first home is too high, then you reduce the number of child bearing years and thus the total number of kids.
From my own personal experience I can say that is true. After we got married we actually moved in with my parents for a couple of years to buy a house, and still we got lucky because we bought in 2010 when prices were briefly reasonable again.
If we had been in a home earlier, then probably would have started trying to have kids earlier. Instead we stopped at 2 because my wife was now 38 and we were out of time.
Doubtless the perceived need to go to college is also a factor because again it's delaying family formation.
Policy wise, I think building a ton more housing to bring down the cost of housing and allow for earlier family formation would definitely help move the needle.
After that, a greatly expanded child tax credit could also help. Make it bigger, and make it payable monthly.
Between the two that would also help let people that wanted a spouse to stay home in the first couple of years the chance to do so.
All that being said Cremieux makes a strong case that fertility subsidies do work.
Great post! Not to put the cart before the horse, but I wonder if older mothers utilizing fertility technology won’t have an even harder time keeping up with small kids. What’s really missing on the horizon is social technology to make the job of parenting easier. Some families are experimenting with less intensive or communal parenting, but for now they are stuck at the bottom of the S-curve. Can they reach mass adoption without some stimulus?
I wonder if, much like the rise of homeownership and in-home technology for young parents in during the baby boom increased fertility by making child rearing easier, to what extent has the drop since then been the tech/housing independent ratcheting up of expected parental difficulty?
Like, there was a period where those factors rapidly made parenting easier. But that slowed and in it's place, at least in the US, is a seemingly arbitrary increase in the difficulty of parenting based mostly on expectations but also partly on a ratcheting of scientific knowledge of what is "optimal".
As quick examples of the above, I recall some studies finding that parents with full time jobs today spend more time per week with their kids than stay at home parents did in the 60's or 70's. Was parenting optimal 50 years ago? No. Is the shift entirely good and/or justified? Almost certainly also no.
And on the science/knowledge increasing difficulty thing, I'm reminded of something I read asserting that car seat requirements have actually prevented more births than they have saved lives. Basically, the size of modern car seats means you can only have two in standard cars and even SUVs. So, if a family wants a third child, they would need to buy a new, larger, likely more expensive car.
Now, the equivalence math of prevented birth vs. life saved gets pretty metaphysical pretty quickly. But the point is this doesn't seem like anything near an optimal outcome from the science of safety.
AI, in theory, has the ability to let people work much less, but given the current society we live in, do you really think the benefits will be that evenly spread among the population?
Agree -- like any technological advance, the benefit will be concentrated among the upper echelons.
A significant level of benefit from AI is already available to anyone with access to a web browser, however, and that is likely to continue in the coming years (assuming no Skynet)
Well, as you implicitly say, culture conveys the received wisdom of the age.
Today, pretty much every incentive screams to people that they should put their time, attention and effort towards studying, working, pursuing a career, producing results, earning money. So having kids is (correctly, under those goals) perceived as having a very high opportunity cost. And therefore it takes a hell of a lot of money to move the needle.
In other words a society that is heavily optimized for production of goods and services is not a society that can care too much about production of other humans.
So what do we do? IMO, there are two, pretty much orthogonal (and complementary), ways:
1) Very drastically force the level of equality towards near-zero Gini coefficients. Use UBI and do not allow more than, say, five-fold difference in wealth, income, and ideally status (yes, I know it can't be measured). This will stunt growth, but give people time and space for child bearing and rearing. See for example this excellent article:
"Throughout her life, the average female resident will have two children more than her average Malawian counterpart. At a clinic just across the street from the camp’s arrival point, nurses have tried everything they can to bring down the birth rate. People have gladly taken contraception since a promotional campaign in 2022. Still, birth rates once again rose last year. Very few pregnancies were truly accidental in the first place, reckons a doctor."
This way seems (to me) closer to how humans have lived for the vast majority of their history. But I don't think it's likely in the medium term that states, which compete with each other, would voluntarily suppress economic growth and production.
2) As you hint, we could very heavily invest in excellent, stellar-quality, state-wide child care structures and services, so that you facilitate (and improve upon) the work required to bring up and educate kids, from birth to university admission. This can shift a lot of "workload" (for the lack of a better term) away from families, provided that parents perceive that their child gets the best possible education. And sure, things like IVG will help too.
This way I think it's more likely to happen in the medium term. Especially if you consider than, for reasons not unrelated to equality and expectations, it seems that fewer and fewer people are dating, having sex, and successfully pursuing long term relationships nowadays.
At a first glance, it doesn't look to me that there's any constraint preventing us from choosing something that contains a little bit (or more than a bit) of both solutions. I'd be most comfortable with a middle-of-the-ground solution, but I'd be curious to know what people think, and it would be interesting to understand which direction is more effective.
This tracks for me. We have three kids. Money played no part in our decision not to try for a fourth.
My wife stays at home. We have family nearby who help us out. We were fortunate to be able to hire help to clean and mow after our twins were born.
And yet, we still feel constantly overwhelmed.
If you could reduce the mental load of modern parenting, you might be onto something.
To me the biggest piece that is missing today is optimism. They were riding high on a wave of American exceptionalism and a belief in making a better world. Today's young people wake up every day with a sense of dread and uncertainty. If we want people to have kids they have to believe in the world and what it will become.
Loved this read - definitely advanced my previous thinking. Another direction we have to point technology to is not only the fertility to produce more babies, but the day to day support to raise these families in this modern context. Beyond the paid leave policies and childcare and the cost of families lies the realities of what it takes to be a dual working couple literally trying to make each week work.
We’re in need of a second family industrial boom - one that relieves women of the heavy administrative load and that invites men and other caregivers in, on their terms.
This isn’t just about “dividing up work” more fairly, but “disappearing” work that is making having kids seem undoable for many young women. As you pointed out, much of the boom followed a cultural model of desirability. We need the same again but entered around the very real mental load that’s a specific side effect of our digital age.
I wholeheartedly believe that the right science and tech can unlock new family possibilities by lifting these real burdens in new ways but the mental load can’t be “gadgetized” in the same way so it’ll take creative ways to solve.
Great post. I think like with everything in demography, the answer is very complex and counter-intuitive. In the US, the spread of household appliances has for sure contributed to the baby boom. But in Poland for example, common household appliances didn't become popular until decades later, yet the baby boom still happened.
To the question from the last paragraph - "can it happen again?" - I think we already know the answer. The US went through another, albeit much more muted, baby boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. After dropping like a stone in early 1970s and staying there for two decades, fertility rates jumped almost overnight by 10-15% in the late 80s and stayed there until the 2008 financial crisis. And again, it was common among all groups, not just because of increased Hispanic population in the US.
The more potent question is why. And I think I'd go back to my original observation that the mid-century baby boom happened everywhere, regardless of development level of countries. So what else could drive it? And as much as I dislike this answer, I have to say - it's probably religiosity. Religious people have more children nearly everywhere on Earth.
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of weakened religiosity. Then the Great Depression has drawn people back to churches and temples and the result was more babies. Similarly, in the late 60s, religiosity has declined significantly in the US and a depression in births followed but then the religious right counter-acted achieved its peak between late 80s and early aughts, which coincided with higher birth rates.
That second smaller baby boom is interesting also because it only happened in the US - it did not have an equivalent in Europe. Not surprisingly, back then the US was a significantly more religious country than Western European ones.
This is probably also part the answer it also is I think part of the reason why Israel has higher fertility rates.
The Gen X joke is that we were raised on hose water and neglect. So, from that perspective, it does look from the outside that raising kids now takes a heck of a lot more cultural time, energy and money. Parents aren't done at 18 anymore either, with "kids" being well in to their 20's before leaving the nest.
Or maybe we need to return to the Gen X model.
Jonathan Haidt makes a pretty convincing case that kids need a lot of unstructured play where they run around and act like kids with minimal (but not zero) adult supervision.
Kids don't need to be doing activities every second of everyday. Get rid of the travel teams, put down the screens go outside and play
Great article. I very much think that one key to the fertility rate is early family formation. If we put off that family formation because say the cost of getting your first home is too high, then you reduce the number of child bearing years and thus the total number of kids.
From my own personal experience I can say that is true. After we got married we actually moved in with my parents for a couple of years to buy a house, and still we got lucky because we bought in 2010 when prices were briefly reasonable again.
If we had been in a home earlier, then probably would have started trying to have kids earlier. Instead we stopped at 2 because my wife was now 38 and we were out of time.
Doubtless the perceived need to go to college is also a factor because again it's delaying family formation.
Policy wise, I think building a ton more housing to bring down the cost of housing and allow for earlier family formation would definitely help move the needle.
After that, a greatly expanded child tax credit could also help. Make it bigger, and make it payable monthly.
Between the two that would also help let people that wanted a spouse to stay home in the first couple of years the chance to do so.
All that being said Cremieux makes a strong case that fertility subsidies do work.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/storks-take-orders-from-the-state?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&utm_medium=email&hide_intro_popup=true
Also current car seat rules are bonkers and are almost certainly effecting the fertility rate as well
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception
Just a heads up that the link in your second footnote leads to a 404 error.
Great post! Not to put the cart before the horse, but I wonder if older mothers utilizing fertility technology won’t have an even harder time keeping up with small kids. What’s really missing on the horizon is social technology to make the job of parenting easier. Some families are experimenting with less intensive or communal parenting, but for now they are stuck at the bottom of the S-curve. Can they reach mass adoption without some stimulus?
I wonder if, much like the rise of homeownership and in-home technology for young parents in during the baby boom increased fertility by making child rearing easier, to what extent has the drop since then been the tech/housing independent ratcheting up of expected parental difficulty?
Like, there was a period where those factors rapidly made parenting easier. But that slowed and in it's place, at least in the US, is a seemingly arbitrary increase in the difficulty of parenting based mostly on expectations but also partly on a ratcheting of scientific knowledge of what is "optimal".
As quick examples of the above, I recall some studies finding that parents with full time jobs today spend more time per week with their kids than stay at home parents did in the 60's or 70's. Was parenting optimal 50 years ago? No. Is the shift entirely good and/or justified? Almost certainly also no.
And on the science/knowledge increasing difficulty thing, I'm reminded of something I read asserting that car seat requirements have actually prevented more births than they have saved lives. Basically, the size of modern car seats means you can only have two in standard cars and even SUVs. So, if a family wants a third child, they would need to buy a new, larger, likely more expensive car.
Now, the equivalence math of prevented birth vs. life saved gets pretty metaphysical pretty quickly. But the point is this doesn't seem like anything near an optimal outcome from the science of safety.
AI may be part of the answer.
As Derek noted, there were several factors that increased the fertility rate:
* Dishwashers, laundry machines, etc, made child rearing easier
* Low housing prices made it cheaper
* Cultural factors encouraged optimism for the future.
AI has the potential to:
* Lower mental load on parents (what and when to buy things for kids, school tasks, etc).
* Reduce costs: cheaper goods (potentially alongside increased unemployment, but that's another discussion), UBI
* Creating a cultural zeitgeist of (wait for it....) abundance!
TBD
AI, in theory, has the ability to let people work much less, but given the current society we live in, do you really think the benefits will be that evenly spread among the population?
Agree -- like any technological advance, the benefit will be concentrated among the upper echelons.
A significant level of benefit from AI is already available to anyone with access to a web browser, however, and that is likely to continue in the coming years (assuming no Skynet)
Well, as you implicitly say, culture conveys the received wisdom of the age.
Today, pretty much every incentive screams to people that they should put their time, attention and effort towards studying, working, pursuing a career, producing results, earning money. So having kids is (correctly, under those goals) perceived as having a very high opportunity cost. And therefore it takes a hell of a lot of money to move the needle.
In other words a society that is heavily optimized for production of goods and services is not a society that can care too much about production of other humans.
So what do we do? IMO, there are two, pretty much orthogonal (and complementary), ways:
1) Very drastically force the level of equality towards near-zero Gini coefficients. Use UBI and do not allow more than, say, five-fold difference in wealth, income, and ideally status (yes, I know it can't be measured). This will stunt growth, but give people time and space for child bearing and rearing. See for example this excellent article:
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/04/03/what-a-refugee-camp-reveals-about-economics
"Throughout her life, the average female resident will have two children more than her average Malawian counterpart. At a clinic just across the street from the camp’s arrival point, nurses have tried everything they can to bring down the birth rate. People have gladly taken contraception since a promotional campaign in 2022. Still, birth rates once again rose last year. Very few pregnancies were truly accidental in the first place, reckons a doctor."
This way seems (to me) closer to how humans have lived for the vast majority of their history. But I don't think it's likely in the medium term that states, which compete with each other, would voluntarily suppress economic growth and production.
2) As you hint, we could very heavily invest in excellent, stellar-quality, state-wide child care structures and services, so that you facilitate (and improve upon) the work required to bring up and educate kids, from birth to university admission. This can shift a lot of "workload" (for the lack of a better term) away from families, provided that parents perceive that their child gets the best possible education. And sure, things like IVG will help too.
This way I think it's more likely to happen in the medium term. Especially if you consider than, for reasons not unrelated to equality and expectations, it seems that fewer and fewer people are dating, having sex, and successfully pursuing long term relationships nowadays.
At a first glance, it doesn't look to me that there's any constraint preventing us from choosing something that contains a little bit (or more than a bit) of both solutions. I'd be most comfortable with a middle-of-the-ground solution, but I'd be curious to know what people think, and it would be interesting to understand which direction is more effective.