Birth rates are plummeting around the globe, as half the world’s population now lives in countries with sub-replacement fertility rates. Total population is already falling in Japan, Italy, and China, and global population decline looks likely to begin within a few decades. Yet as American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Tim Carney points out in his new book Family Unfriendly, the United States bucked these worldwide trends until relatively recently. As of 2007, the U.S. was above replacement fertility and even trending upwards, but since then births have fallen off sharply.
On this episode of the Permanent Problem podcast, Tim Carney joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss why low fertility and population decline are problems worth worrying about, examine the social and cultural trends that are pushing us away from parenthood and family, and take a look at the exceptional places that continue to embrace big families for clues as to how things might turn around.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: My guest today on the Permanent Problem is Tim Carney, who’s a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, a senior columnist at the Washington Examiner, and the author of a number of books, including most recently, Family Unfriendly, How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder than It Needs to Be.
Let me say right off the bat, this is an excellent book and it’s an important book and I’m very excited to have you on the show to talk about it. So welcome, Tim.
Tim Carney: Thank you.
Lindsey: Let me start by digging into your biography a bit, which I think is especially relevant today, because although you’ve written a few books before, I think you’ve been working on this one your whole life. And by that, I mean, it’s a deeply personal book. It’s got plenty of meaty social scientific analysis like you’d expect from a think tank scholar, and it also dives into really big ideas of profound significance, but think the starting point of the book, the motivation to write it, I would guess, the moral compass that directs it and of course, all the personal anecdotes that crop up throughout the book, all of that comes out of your own personal experience, in particular the experience of being the dad to six kids.
Carney: That is correct. We are supposed to write what we know as writers and raising kids is one of the things my wife and I know well. I like to think that when it comes to dads, I have changed more diapers than 99% of the American population.
Lindsey:You’re definitely there on the far tail. So how old are they now?
Carney: The oldest is 17, the youngest is seven. So we are out of diapers, but in the thick of everything of-
Lindsey: Starting to push them out the door, getting close.
Carney: For me, it wouldn’t be pushing. My wife would probably … be eager for the nest to start emptying. I’m not emotionally-
Lindsey: Anyway, time to start saying bye to them. So where were you born? Where’d you grow up?
Carney: I’m a New Yorker. I was born in Greenwich Village. In the movie, The Jerk, where Steve Martin was born a poor Black child, I was born a poor … a rich liberal kid. We grew up in New York City, in Greenwich Village and then in the suburbs of New York, and I was the youngest of four boys. So my older three brothers are packed in there in age, and that was really defining to my childhood was that I was as raised by my older brothers as I was by my parents.
Lindsey: So you’re Roman Catholic, that features prominently in the book, but were you raised that way?
Carney: No, we were raised what I call nonpracticing Catholic. If Grandma was in town we might go to mass and we were all baptized, but that was it. I came into the church, got first communion, confession, confirmation, all of that stuff as a 25-year-old. So it was an adopted faith to some extent.
Lindsey: Okay, but your wife, she grew up in a big Catholic family?
Carney: Yes. My wife is number four out of eight and she was a cradle Catholic here in Northern Virginia.
Lindsey: I’ll just tell you a quick anecdote. My wife, my Thai wife, is a living demonstration of the demographic transition. Her dad is one of 17 brothers and sisters.
Carney: Wow.
Lindsey: He and his wife had three kids and my wife Meaw had two kids in her first marriage. So that’s from 17 to 2 in two generations.
So you went to St. John’s College in Annapolis. That’s a small liberal arts college known for its great books curriculum, right?
Carney: That’s right. So you read Plato and Aristotle and you study your physics from Newton, your math from Euclid and Lobachevsky, et cetera.
Lindsey: So you say you grew up in a liberal family, but it seems to me that St. Johns typically appeals to people of conservative inclination. So were you leaning that way or where was your head at when you decided to go there?
Carney: Do you remember the show Family Ties and the Alex P. Keaton character played by Michael J. Fox? My oldest brother was kind of an Alex P. Keaton character. I mean the liberals were talking about nuclear disarmament and Reagan was there saying, “My strategy is we win, you lose.” For young boys, that was great. And we rebelled against our Greenwich Village environment. So all four of us were fairly conservative, and some of our New York State public school teachers enjoyed the back and forth. Some of them resented it, but St. John’s was definitely a place where I got to explore questions on my own without being lectured to about what the right answer was.
Lindsey: So your conservatism came fraternally, but also, kind of as adolescent rebellion.
Carney: Exactly.
Lindsey: All right. So I look at your CV, and you’ve spent your whole career working for conservative organizations and institutions. Human Events, Evans and Novak, Regnery Publishing, Hillsdale College, currently AEI and Washington Examiner. American conservatism has been through some pretty major upheavals since you came to Washington in the early 2000s, in particular, Trump and Trumpism happened and remaking the American right along populist lines. So I’m curious, first of all, about your assessment of the populist surge, which is happening now, not just in the US but all over the world, and how you see your own version of conservatism in relation to it.
Carney: So one thing to define myself very clearly against was something Mike Pence said recently, where he seemed to say that conservatism and populism were two totally divergent paths that could not be trod simultaneously. And I totally disagree with that. Before I saw what conservative populism could be, before Trump was on the scene, so we’re talking starting in 2005, I was railing against corporate welfare. I was a conservative saying the Washington DC lobbying big business nexus is a partner with big government and that this hurts the little guy. And then when Mitt Romney went ahead-
Lindsey: Small government, free market, populism.
Carney: Yes, exactly. And then Mitt Romney went ahead and lost in 2012 saying, “Oh, well the lower 47% will never take responsibility for their lives.” This anti-populist, explicitly elitist message, he said in a fundraiser, who knows how close that was to what he felt at the time, what he feels now, but he was trying to define Republicanism and conservatism as elitism and anti-populism, which seemed to me totally tone-deaf after the Wall Street bailouts, after Obama had beaten McCain with the backing of big business, after Obama had advanced Obamacare with the backing of most of that industry. So yeah, in 2012, 2013, I started really beating the drum for what I call free-market populism.
Lindsey: Right.
Carney: And then, the next presidential nominee-
Lindsey: You wished on a monkey’s paw, Tim!
Carney: Yeah, and then we got a populist. It was not what I expected. So to get a little more nuance, I think populism and conservatism, populism and belief in free markets really can go hand in hand in part because of an over-centralizing tendency of elitism and antipathy to local difference and antipathy to religion that sometimes comes down from elitism of the left and right. I think that I’m a kind of Tocquevillian conservative, you could say. I think that local institutions, that little platoons are absolutely necessary to making democracy work, to making small L, liberalism work and to making conservatism work.
So in the end it becomes a semantic debate over the meaning of the word populism…
Lindsey: Sure, but does your understanding of populism have anything to do with actually existing Trumpism?
Carney: Almost none. Every once in a while he says something like, well, that’s kind of right, but Trumpism was definitely not what I was signing up for.
Lindsey: As you mentioned, you started out, I would call it free-market muckraking, right? Exposing the petty and gross corruptions endemic to big government, rent-seeking and regulatory favor-seeking of other kinds, subsidies, bailouts, pork barrel spending, and so forth. But then in 2019, your book, Alienated America, you went off in a quite different direction, I’m guessing in response to the Trump earthquake. So the green eyeshade comes off, and you’re not looking at dollars and cents and budget items and regulatory complexities now. You’re looking at something much vaguer, more qualitative than quantitative. You can talk about it in social science terms and call it social capital, but what you were really looking at is: what is a good community, and what is the role of community in a good life? And in particular, you were trying, I think, to make sense of what had happened and how Trump had come to power in the Republican Party and then, in the electorate as a whole. And you saw the rise of Trump as a symptom of the disintegration of community. So tell me a little bit about that book and how it came about.
Carney: Absolutely. There’s a couple of different origin stories I could tell. One was me literally walking out of the bathroom at AEI and Arthur Brooks, who was the president then, saying, “Do you have any book ideas?” And I gave him some sort of corporate welfare/crony capitalism book ideas. He said, “You should try to write about something bigger. Something that has a higher altitude view and a deeper importance.” I was thinking, “What could be more important than the Export/Import bank of the United States, Arthur?” And then, I got a phone call from an editor in New York, a book editor, and he said, “Hey, last decade you wrote a couple books. You haven’t written any in a while. Do you have any ideas?” I said, yeah, I gave him three.
He said, none of those are good ideas. He said, what is a question that’s bugging you, that you don’t think anybody has a good answer to? And this was just as I was attending my first Trump rally to report on. And I said, the belief that America needs to be made great again, is grounded in a prior belief that the American dream is dead. Those were in fact, the words Trump said right before the first time he said, make America great again.
Lindsey: Right.
Carney: So why do people think the American dream is dead? At the time, in 2015, the economy was pretty good. Crime was way down. There were so many indicators that things were good. So one explanation was, “Oh, well, this is just rich, white, cis-gendered, Christian males losing their privilege.” Another explanation was the immigrants stole all the jobs. Other explanations were Pikkety and Saez and the idea that really none of the gains in the economy had gone to the working or middle class, they had all gone to the owners of capital. There were all these explanations. And I said, I could explore all those explanations. And then this editor, Eric, said, “Well, you need to have your own answer. Why do people think the American dream is dead?”
And I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Okay, get back to me in a year.” So I got to cover the Trump phenomenon and ask this and slowly-
Lindsey: A question in your mind, and let it percolate for a while.
Carney: And it’s the best way to write a book, by the way. The worst way to write a book is to start with a thesis and hope that there’s enough evidence out there for it. Better to start with a question that you’re pretty sure is going to have an interesting answer and to explore it. And so very, very slowly, it occurred to me that what people were talking about when they were talking about how it used to be better or when they were talking about how they moved away from a place where it’s horrible, what they were talking about was belonging. People use the word social capital. The existence of institutions to belong. What Bowling Alone was about, what Charles Murray landed on at the end of Coming Apart.
All of that was what was coming up, and it wasn’t what Trump was talking about, but it was coming up in the belief that the American dream was dead. And it came into contrast by looking at the places where the dream was alive, where I’d show up at a diner and in come all these families in a middle class town in rural Wisconsin, and they’re pouring in from the churches. And the churches were very robust, a Dutch Reformed church, and they weren’t just holding Sunday worship services, but were building out communities or putting together charities, were supporting the public schools while standing up their own schools.
And where it looked most like the ideal that Tocqueville was describing is where you found conservatives who said, “Oh, I have no interest in Trumpism. I don’t believe the American dream is dead.”
Lindsey: I mean, Trumpism later took over a much larger segment of the GOP electorate, but the appeal started – and you’ve got data, polling data and so forth to back that up – the appeal started, the phenomenon started, the real core base was in these broken communities, low social capital areas.
Carney: The people who had never voted before, who came out of the woodwork, who had been Democrats and showed up and instantly became 25% of the Republican primary electorate in 2015 that was supporting Trump. Those were the alienated voters. That was my argument in the beginning of that book.
Lindsey: So did that book change your mind about anything important? I usually find that I see the world somewhat differently after the experience of really diving into something. So how did your outlook change?
Carney: Well, in a few ways. Again, I’m from Greenwich Village, I wanted to think that there was a conservative real America, where people get married and go to church and have babies and are pro-life and all of that stuff. And that there was a liberal, elite, decadent America where they’re probably all swingers like in some of those movies. I kind of knew that second part wasn’t true, but finding out the brokenness of a lot of real America was one thing. Another thing was a more sober understanding of free trade in the 20th century and what it did, that these factories down and the manufacturing went overseas.
It did make everything cheaper for me, which then freed up some of my capital to invest in other things where people could move from the equilibrium of a factory worker to the equilibrium of a service worker, but it didn’t go that smoothly. And in the places where the factories were, the people didn’t just land in slightly lower paying service jobs, but they landed on their rear end and that’s where the deaths of despair and the drug addiction and that sort of thing come from. So complicating that story of free trade, sort of frictionlessly moving us to a different economy that’s wealthier on the whole, was that there was massive real suffering in particular places.
It’s very easy when you’re looking at social science or writing from DC to abstract away from place, but making me look more clearly at place was one of the big changes.
Lindsey: So now let’s turn to your new book, Family Unfriendly, which I see as an extension of the analysis that you began in Alienated America. So the overarching theme that connects the two books is social disintegration, the progressive unraveling of the vital personal connections that give our lives structure and purpose and meaning. This alas turns out to be one of the major trends in 21st century, certainly in the United States, but all around the world. In Alienated America, you looked at the breakdown of communities and social capital, but here, you take the analysis down further, starting with couples and family formation, where the consequences of this social disintegration have now manifested themselves in a remarkable and completely unanticipated development.
And that is the global crash in fertility rates and the prospect of worldwide population decline. The magic number for fertility is 2.1. Every woman has to produce 2.1 children on average for the population to stay stable. Back in the 1960s when everybody was all worried about the population explosion, when American kids my age were routinely admonished to remember the starving kids in India when we were forced to eat our vegetables – back then, the global fertility rate was over five. Now, the worldwide rate is 2.3 and sinking like a stone. In the United States, it’s 1.7. In Southern Europe, Spain and Portugal, it’s 1.2, 1.3. It’s very low all throughout Asia. Here in Thailand, where I live, it’s 1.4. In China, it’s 1.1, and then in South Korea, it’s an utterly unbelievable 0.7 this year. The rising generation is one-third the size of its parents.
So am I right about the book’s origin story? Did the experience of writing Alienated America lead naturally to this, to keep thinking about the unraveling of social connection, or had you been wanting to write this for a long time because of your personal life?
Carney: Absolutely, no. Again, I loved having three older brothers. My wife’s from a family of eight. I love having six kids, but I was never in the business of telling people, “Hey, we all need to be having six kids or even really caring about birth rates.” I didn’t read Jonathan Last’s book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, until I started worrying about this, about eight years later after he wrote it. And so yes, I think that Alienated America looked at the biggest story of the last 60 years, which is the erosion of civil society, the collapse of belonging in the US. I think the biggest story of at least the next 30 years is the biggest consequence of the collapse of community, and that is the collapse in the birth rate.
There’s other aspects that I look at here besides just following birth rates, which is the epidemic of childhood anxiety. I think these are directly connected. So those two phenomena that children are more anxious than ever before and that people are having fewer kids, more people are going childless. People want fewer kids and people are having fewer kids than they want. So in all of these ways, we’re moving away from family, moving away from healthy family, marriage rates are going down, marriage is getting postponed. The delayed marriages aren’t just turning up with the same number of kids just later in life, which is what people thought in 2012. I called it the happy planning story. That’s not happening. So yes, in some ways, Family Unfriendly is a sequel to Alienated America.
Lindsey: So on my Substack, The Permanent Problem, I’ve focused quite a bit on plummeting fertility. The general theme of the Substack is basically, if we’re so rich, why aren’t we happier? Why is there so much misery and dysfunction in societies that have amassed such riches and powers? So this is a big turnaround in outlook for me from say, 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell to early 2016, when Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination. During that time I was quite confident that we were on the wide wonderful road of progress, that sure there would be lots of messiness and local disappointments, but the US and the wider world were on track for a richer, freer, happier, healthier, better governed future.
In recent years, alas, new events have rolled in and I’ve lost that belief that we’re on the road of progress. There’s still a lot about the world that’s getting better and amazing in exciting ways, but there’s a whole lot that’s getting worse, a whole lot of social indicators that are heading in the wrong direction. This darker view of things is a very unaccustomed perspective for me, so therefore I’m constantly second guessing. Maybe I’m overreacting. And it’s a confounding fact that I’m right now entering the phase of life where it is stereotypical to say the world is going to hell and complain about kids these days.
And objectively, the world is going to hell. And there’s a lot of problems with kids these days. So I’m always wondering, is it me or is it really the world? To me, the slam dunk argument that it’s not just me, that things really have taken a wrong turn, that our social system really is making us spiritually poor while it’s still making us materially richer, that slam dunk argument is what’s happened to fertility. This is the ultimate existential test for a society or a culture, even more basic than the test of war. A culture that can’t reproduce itself isn’t sustainable, period. And modern urban consumerist capitalism isn’t reproducing itself. So quite simply it’s on the path to extinction.
So I can’t think of a more urgent issue to figure out what’s happened and figure out how we might turn things around, but I can say … and you could tell me if you’ve had the same experience, the mere fact that the population of the planet is about to start going down, that it’s already going down in a number of countries, that doesn’t strike most people as something to get alarmed about. I’d say the predominant reaction is, “Wow, what a relief. I thought we were going to have a population explosion. We could do with less people and less crowding.” So I think the first order of business in discussing this issue is establishing that it is indeed a cause for serious concern. And people … I remember Ben Wattenberg wrote The Birth Dearth in the late 1980s, focusing on rich countries. So this issue has been slowly building demographic momentum for decades, but now, it’s actually cashing out in falling populations and not just gently declining, but precipitously declining populations. Are you pushing on an open door when you’re talking to people about this is a problem or do you have to convince them?
Carney: A lot of people I do have to convince, and again, I’m in Washington DC in think tank circles, and so sometimes I’m speaking to Catholic conservative crowds and they’re naturally concerned. There’s very little convincing. A lot of times I’m speaking to young crowds where you’re told when you’re in college, you get to make of your life whatever you want. So then when somebody like me comes around and worries about what they’re making of their life, they say, “Hey, what are you doing old man? Why are you worrying?” And then, libertarian crowds that sometimes think anybody who worries about anybody else’s decisions is about to come in with some giant government mandate or something like that, that I can say I’m not going to-
Lindsey: If there isn’t a good solution there can’t be a problem.
Carney: Yes, exactly. And as (a) a journalist, (b) a conservative and maybe (c) an Irishman, my specialty is pointing out problems. And don’t worry, I don’t have that many solutions. We can talk about some that might help, but yes, I do definitely find some people say, why should I care about this or why do you care about this?
Lindsey: Have you spoken to college crowds yet about this book?
Carney: Yes, college crowds and law school crowds, so one of the big things that competes with family is career ambition.
Lindsey: Of course.
Carney: And so I’ve spoken at Ivy League schools and at law schools where the career ambition of these 18, 19, early 20 folks is very high. And both times the head of the organization who invited me said, I think all of these people don’t care about family and they only care about the career and your job is to convince them otherwise, which it’s hard when you’re starting with that, but I try. Yes, I’ve spoken to college crowds, I’ve spoken to religious crowds, I’ve spoken to libertarian crowds. And there has certainly been a lot of people who say, even say it’s a little creepy that you care if other people are having kids.
Lindsey: Right, so the obvious pragmatic reason to be concerned about population aging and population decline is that they look to be very, very bad for economic growth and technological progress. So much of our economic life and so much of our contemporary welfare state are premised on a perpetually rising population and therefore, perpetually increasing aggregate GDP. So what happens when that premise doesn’t hold any longer? You want to talk a little about the economic consequences?
Carney: Sure.
Lindsey: Now in America, we’re insulated by still having fairly robust immigration, but already, our native-born working-age population is shrinking. So of necessity, all job growth in America is from immigrants.
Carney: Yes, and one of the measures I look at is a working-age population. It used to steadily grow at a decent clip, but now, it’s almost flatlined in the last few years. And that’s before we’ve even had the recent baby busts come of age. I start Family Unfriendly in 2006 and 2007 when we had a baby boomlet. Since then, every year basically since 2007, the number of babies born has gone down. The birth rate, the total fertility rate was about 2.1 in 2007, falling down to below 1.7, both right before and now right after the pandemic. So that baby bust is 15 years old, so it hasn’t even entered the working-age population. Colleges are preparing for this already.
The colleges know that the next year’s senior class is going to be the peak high school graduates and high schools are getting hit. Elementary schools have already been. So when the workforce gets hit by this baby bust in a few years, we’re going to have what Japan and South Korea have, which is a decreasing working-age population, unless immigration policy radically changes, because right now, as you said, immigration is the only thing keeping it level and slightly increasing. So people will always jump to social security, but for me, the insolvency of social security is just … it’s an image. It’s a reflection on the wall of the fact that we have fewer people to do productive work.
So technology will fill some of these gaps. How much and which ones, we don’t know. Google Gemini can’t actually get into your car and fix it. So right now, I was just reading a story about car repair costs going way up. There will be all sorts of things that will be done less efficiently, more slowly, lower quality and more expensive when we have fewer people working. And that’s just sort of from a static viewpoint. Innovation comes from youngish people and older society will be less innovative. So 20 years from now, we will be less innovative than we are right now.
Lindsey: One thing I really liked about your book is your emphasis on the contingency of the recent fertility drop in the U.S. When you start focusing on this issue, it’s easy to get just swept away with the profound universality of the trend. It started a couple of centuries ago, it’s happening everywhere across languages and cultures, prenatal policies at the margin don’t seem to do a lot. So it’s easy to feel like you’re just caught in this inevitable tsunami driven by profoundly deep social forces and there’s not much to do. In the U.S., things were different pretty recently.
The baby boom ended officially two years after I was born, in 1964. And thereafter, fertility declined precipitously during the 60s and 70s and went well under replacement in the 70s, but then climbed back up in the 80s an 90s and was right around replacement in the early 00s, as you mentioned. And then, the financial crisis and various other things happened, cultural trends that we’ll talk about, and then a pretty steep slide.
Let’s talk about some of the things that have changed then in the past 15 or 20 years. Right off the bat, there’s this general syndrome that you refer to as the travel soccer trap, and really that’s a nice synecdoche for helicopter parenting and the death of spontaneous unplanned childhood more generally. So this phenomenon really seems to have taken off in the 80s, 90s. Talk about the phenomenon generally, and your own experience in getting sucked into it and trying to stay out of it.
Carney: Yeah. I mean, when I was a kid, I rode my bike to my Little League games and my parents almost never felt they had to come. They would come if it was the nicest thing to do on a spring evening, but if there’s other stuff they didn’t feel they had to go. And to the extent there was travel sports, it was like an all-star team in the summer that again, you’d ride your bike to the field and the other parents would drive. The parents who really wanted to go would drive you three towns over to the other town. There was nobody making a ton of money off of convincing my parents to put me in a program. The point of baseball was baseball. I mean, to me it was baseball, there was nothing else as a kid.
To the adults involved, it was the virtues. It was learning how to lose with grace, learning how to win with grace, learning that working harder can pay dividends. Learning how to be part of a team. I got to be captain a couple of times and that was a great experience. I got to literally be … especially in basketball, the last guy on the bench. And that was an amazing experience. All of those things, I felt like I had coaches who understood that that was ultimately the point of this, even while convincing us kids that hustling and winning was the real point. Youth sports today, recently for the upper middle class, but now as well for the middle and working class can be a hyper-competitive beast that’s super intensive and super expensive. And where kids are told to specialize starting at age 12, where culture becomes subservient to the sports.
I’ve had multiple dads tell me, I thought that I would set the schedule for my family, but the swim coach sets the schedule for my family and I hate that fact. So all of this, I have lamented since after college and I was playing in a men’s league and I knew other guys who were either coaching travel ball or their boys were in travel ball. And it was the first time I heard a kid told, “You can’t play football in the fall because if you don’t play fall baseball, we won’t even look at you in the JV tryouts.”
It wasn’t that he was afraid of falling behind. It was that there was a rule. You had to play baseball 12 months a year. And this is obviously, just a shame for kids, but parents do it without even thinking because they think that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Lindsey: It’s this importation of parental careerist drive and organizational rigor imposed on childhood. So that cashes out in making parenting much more labor-intensive, much more burdensome, much more stressful than it was when we were kids. And there’s good wonky data on this. There’s studies of how much time parents spend with their kids and how much time they spend on the job, et cetera. Talk about that.
Carney: So this was a number that caused my editor to lose his mind when he saw it. Time use studies look at times that parents spend with children, looking after children and doing other things like eating dinner. You’re both eating, you’re with your spouse, you’re even … but then what about the times that you’re just serving the kids? You’re driving your kid to travel lacrosse, you are tying their shoes when they’re little, you are sitting down and helping them with their homework or you’re filling out all the paperwork for whatever. Fathers compared to 1975 have doubled the amount of fathering time-
Lindsey: Per week.
Carney: Yeah, per week. I think that’s probably a good thing. Women, obviously, work outside of the home for pay much, much more than they did in 1975. Mothers nonetheless have increased their time that they spend just on parenting by 50%. The hours increase … it’s actually more than the hour increase for the fathers. And all of this, while families are smaller.
Lindsey: Parenting time spent with the kids has multiplied.
Carney: Yeah. It has gone way up while families have gotten smaller, and while we’ve moved towards more dual-income families where both parents are working outside of the home. So that’s just one example. There’s also, I look at the studies on the effects on children. Kids who specialize was one of the studies. If you play just one sport 10 months out the year, those children are more anxious. They’re more likely to get certain injuries. And baseball, you think of the arm injuries and basketball, it’s knees and other problems that even the NBA commissioner said, we got these 19-year-old rookies whose bodies look like 30-year-old men. The most interesting study for me showed not just a general anxiety, it was a lower opinion of their own ability at the sport.
Now, they’re probably much better than people our age were when they were kids, because we didn’t specialize in that way when it comes to specific skills, but they have a lower opinion of it. And part of it is, they are dedicating their life to this. They hold themselves to higher standards, but also, they climb up this ladder. And if you’re good enough, you end up in some national tournament and you look around and you’re now in the position that I was naturally in at age 17, saying, “I’m the worst player on the worst team.” Guess what? I felt lucky to have made the varsity squad because all I did outside of that was play pickup basketball. But these kids have dedicated their whole life and they look around, they say, “Just in the state of Pennsylvania, there are 200 people better than me that I’m looking at right now at this tournament.”
Failing and realizing you’re not that good is a good part of childhood, but when your parents have built your whole life around it, that really becomes dispiriting.
Lindsey: Yeah, so on the one hand, parenting has – in a largely self-inflicted way, through the culture – become much more burdensome. At the same time, its importance has been culturally downgraded. So another thing that’s changed in recent decades, people are starting to call it workism. And that is growing cultural prioritization of your job as the most important thing about your life and the downgrading of family as much less important to a fulfilling happy life. So there’s a 2021 survey. 56% of Americans said that having a job you enjoy is essential to a fulfilling life. Only 27% said the same thing about having kids. And only 25% said getting married was essential for fulfillment.
So this is clearly an attitudinal sea change. Children are no longer a moral imperative or just an unquestioned part of life. They’re one consumer choice among many. And you’ve got a chapter titled You Should Quit Your Job. Tell us about the excesses of workism in your view.
Carney: Absolutely. So the funny thing is on work, I’m sort of a moderate, I have friends, some libertarian friends, some leftist friends who say employment is nothing other than a contract where you give labor and they give you money. That is not actually how I feel about work. I think it is actually a source of meaning, a source of friendship that a good employer treats you like a human and you treat the company like a team that you’re happy to be part of. Again, I’ve been lucky to work at places like the Washington Examiner and AEI that behave that way.
So I’m not an instrumentalist when it comes to work, but again, I’m a moderate because the other extreme is an often unstated – and Derek Thompson at the Atlantic wrote about this – workism where where there’s fewer families and less religion. Now, maybe that’s a cause or maybe that’s an effect, but people seek to find their meaning in work. I see this explicitly stated by young people. Again, I’ll speak to colleges, AEI will have whole intern cadres come in and I speak. And one young woman, after I was working on this book and talking about it, after a talk to the whole intern class, she came up to me and she said, I would love to get married and have kids, but it would detract from my career.
She’s specifically put in the terms of divorce. If I got divorced, she said, I’d have a delayed career and I’d be at the mercy of a divorce settlement and divorce law. That seemed like a truly sad way to look at it, not just not wanting to go into marriage for fear of it failing, but also just that idea that you would get married if it didn’t interfere with your career, you would have kids if it didn’t interfere with your career. It was an unshakable priority for her. And I think that that’s absolutely setting in among millennials and Gen Z.
Lindsey: You identify other trends that are pushing us towards, as you call it, a culture of sterility. On the one hand, there’s the cultural prioritization of autonomy and self-expression uber alles, and in particular among young people a strong drive to keep options open as long as possible so that the field of choice remains as wide as possible. Clearly, having babies narrows that field of choice fairly drastically; it’s a huge commitment. So having a baby is swimming against that cultural current.
And beyond the strong emphasis on autonomy, there’s an increasing risk aversion, a focus on safety and certainty in life. As I long said, having children is a singularity, such that it is completely impossible to know what life is like on the other side of it … because you’re going to be a different person on the other side of it. So making those kinds of leaps of faith is again, pretty countercultural these days when you see dangers at every turn and when you feel compelled to maximize safety and certainty to the extent possible, the prospect of raising kids seems not just daunting, but actually terrifying. So describe what you call it, and I think this is a very nice turn phrase, the antibiotic mindset.
Carney: Yeah, so again, I went to St. John’s, I studied Greek. And I think maybe I was just reveling in the power of our pharmaceutical antibiotics to kill my kid’s strep or ear infection, but also thinking about during COVID, when human breath was something that people were terrified of and when people started looking for places where there were as few humans as possible, and I just thought, this is really an aversion to life. And at that time, during COVID, a lot of people were saying, “Well, this is how I’m going to keep alive.” I thought it didn’t start and end there.
It was already this idea that if it’s alive, it’s unpredictable, and what modernity ought to be able to do is remove the uncertainty. I just think of chemistry versus biology is one of the dichotomies I make in how life science inherently has a lot more question marks than chemical science.
Lindsey: Right.
Carney: If you mix certain chemicals, you know what’s going to happen. You put animals in captivity or in the wild, you can get some range of predictions, but there’s huge uncertainty. And I think the modern mind says “Okay, we should be able to build a predictable life.” And when I was just talking to kids at Cornell-
Lindsey: Everything is focused on being organized and optimized, and you just can’t optimize with kids. You tread water.
Carney: Exactly. Just talking to kids at Cornell and they were talking about the fact that they could actually game out college a little bit, because you knew what the course offerings were going to be. It was a very closed setting, and they just said, “I’m starting to realize that life outside of college is totally unpredictable, totally unplannable.” And this was daunting and scary for them, especially probably because they weren’t told as kids, go wander the neighborhood and see what you find.
Lindsey: Right.
Carney: They were funneled in this. The idea that you can have control of your life gets absolutely blown up the moment you have a kid. I quote Socrates saying, wisdom is knowing what you don’t know. And I quote Mike Tyson saying, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I use that to describe the birth plan and my wife’s labor and delivery with our first kid we’re just like, “Whoa, I’m glad we didn’t think we knew where it was going.” Let’s just say that. Secondly, raising a kid, when we first saw our first baby, I looked at her, I thought, who is this person? I didn’t meet you. Wait, you’re now one of my best friends for the rest of my life, and I’ve never met you.
I use the analogy of how freshmen roommates were assigned when you and I were young, which is just random assignment by some higher up.
Lindsey: Right.
Carney: You get a kid, you didn’t get to choose them and they’re yours. So that idea of planning your life, of intentional living goes out the window with family.
Lindsey: Yes. I remember when I first came home from the hospital with our first child, we had a thunderstorm and a power outage right after that. So we had to light candles and we’re just completely overwhelmed with terror that we’ve got this thing in our house and there’s no instruction manual, and now we’re going to burn down the house and kill everybody in the first few hours. Yeah, and it goes from there.
So you look at places that are bucking the trend, people that are continuing to have a lot of babies. For the highest fertility groups, the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews, it’s a combination of strong religious belief and a conscious effort to hold themselves apart from their larger secular culture. Mormons used to be another outlier. Their fertility is still above replacement, but it’s falling now. And it looks like now they’re just sort of a few decades behind the overall American trend.
Israel is the most interesting example. It’s the only rich country that has above replacement ability. And it’s not just the ultra-Orthodox there, although they are now a significant percentage of the population and their fertility is like six or seven. Even secular Jews have fertility right around replacement and ordinary religious Jews are between. Tell me your take on what’s going on in Israel. Is it the babies are contagious, as you say? Explain what you mean by that. Is it the fact that Israel exists on the slope of active volcano, that they’re surrounded by people who want them dead? It’s a cliche that you don’t really appreciate what you’ve got until you’ve almost lost it, and it’s common for people to change their priorities after a heart attack. And is that existential precarity a part of it?
Carney: I think all of that is part of it, and I agree it was the most interesting story. It’s why I put at the middle of the book. I traveled to Israel. So first my wife and I went as part of a group with a Catholic religious pilgrimage, and I stuck around for a few days and I told my wife, I said, “I wish I could stay longer, because I want to make sure I get enough interviews.” It turns out that as a New Yorker, it’s a lot like being in New York in that, Israelis are not shy to share their opinion with you. Basically every single human I saw, I put a microphone in their face and started talking to them about why you have so many kids.
And of course, like New Yorkers, they all disagreed. So the first guy was this religious guy, Menachem, and he’s like, “It’s just about religion. It’s the teaching. God’s first commandment is be fruitful and multiply.” And by the end of the discussion, which was the two of us racing through the streets, because he was running late for a family photo shoot, with his two little babies. By the end of the discussion, he was like, “Okay, I think that while religion is the most important factor, it’s not the only factor precisely because as I said, secular Israelis are having … if they were their own country, they would be the second most fertile country in the wealthy world. More than Europe, more than the US.”
And so then other guy I met, this time in Tel Aviv, told me that God has nothing to do with their family planning decisions as he’s pushing his two older kids around in a stroller and his wife is home napping with the baby. And he said, “You have to keep the tribe going.” So this is a reference to sort of … not just a current geopolitical situation, but the historic situation from Pharaoh to the modern day, multiple attempts to actually eradicate this tribe from the face of the earth.
Lindsey: So they’ve had a cultural meme of self-preservation in hostile circumstances for a long, long time.
Carney: What I focus on is the effects of that mindset. And so, I craft the image of a garden where the central tree is religion, and the other two trees are the current geopolitical situation and the history of the tribe, but what these trees do, not only giving fruit to people who care about these particular things, they create an ecosystem that suddenly, you’ve got squirrels, you’ve got chipmunks, you’ve got bird’s nests, you’ve got all sorts of animals. And what you have is a culture that broadly, if you sort of got dropped into Israel and you had two young kids, you would say, “Wow, this is a great place to raise kids.”
One guy in Maryland … I used to live right adjacent to an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. One guy there described his time in Israel, he said, “The bus drivers have a real affection for little kids.” And I just thought about that, telling your 8-year-old, “You know how to ride the bus to go to wherever. Go to your basketball game, go to school.” And to imagine that the bus driver is going to be a guy who’s going to be like, “All right, let’s go. Come on. How was school today?” Not the school bus drivers, the municipal bus drivers.
Lindsey: Yes.
Carney: And Menachem said, “Oh, well six-year olds are allowed to walk to school. They know they’re not allowed to cross the street. So as an adult, you regularly walk up to a crosswalk and there’s some 6-year-old waiting for the next adult to walk them across the street.” Kids are everywhere and it’s normal to have them everywhere. So that’s part of what I mean by pregnancy is contagious, is that it’s just you expect to see kids and kids are an expected part of adulthood. And that’s a contrast to a lot of Western Europe and the US where again, we are so deliberate and intentional about planning our lives. Are you going to get married? That’s entirely up to you. Are you going to have kids? It’s entirely up to you. Now, obviously, these things should be entirely up to the individuals.
And we’ve had some cultures that have erred in the side of expecting and demanding these things from people, but my ideal is a sort of norm that you can opt out of. When you’re a grownup, you get married and have kids. If that’s not for you, that’s not for you but that’s kind of the path.
Lindsey: The default setting, yes.
Carney: And in Israel, that’s definitely the path. So one back in Camp Mill, the Jewish neighborhood, I said to one woman, “All right, you got a lot of kids in this neighborhood, but some people have five kids as opposed to three. Why do you think that is?” She says, in those social circles, I think five is just what you do. Some places you take off your shoes when you walk in somebody’s house, it’s just what you do. And in some places you have five kids.”
Lindsey: A lot of kids.
Carney: Which would describe my own Catholic social circles, which are not ordinary. We send our kids to Catholic schools where being one of six is not terribly out of the ordinary.
Lindsey: So another feature of high fertility communities is a reliance on the community for backstop parenting with lots of moms and some dads at home. There are eyes on the street that permit a high autonomy, free-range childhood that’s good for the kids and a lifesaver for parents. On my Substack, I’ve written a fair amount about the possibilities for co-housing and co-living arrangements to address a lot of social ills of personal disconnection, but also, including what an onerous labor-intensive and anxious process child-rearing has become. You’ve written positively about this as well.
Carney: Yes. So it really does take a village to raise a child. And this was one of the things I would say between my last two books, I’ve really grown unapologetic and am trying to correct a lot of social conservatives whose love of the nuclear family causes them to deify it and make it be its own freestanding thing. I love the nuclear family too, but it’s like an internal organ. It can’t do all the work on itself. It needs to be supported by community. So you just hinted at one of those, which is a stay-at-home mom or a stay-at-home dad, but historically mostly stay-at-home moms, sitting on the front porch. I talked to so many people. The most common phrase I heard from people my age or slightly older from Gen X basically was, “Come home when the streetlights turn on.”
Lindsey: Right.
Carney: The second most common idea I heard was being yelled at by somebody else’s mom from a front porch and then, trying to race home before that person could figure out who you were and call your own mom, to tell you what you did so that you would get to explain your side. That’s really good, and that’s liberating for both parents and kids to have that idea of eyes on the street. Including in-laws. In Israel, 70% of parents of young children reported having support from their own parents in raising the kids. It’s 35% in Europe. I don’t know the numbers in US, but it’s probably around that same 35%. We have articles, I quote, multiple articles of people saying it’s wrong to even ask your parents … to ask Grandma to help.
One Washington Post columnist I quote complains about how she’s forced to mooch child care off of her mother-in-law. Grandma is getting to take care of her first grandchild and it somehow offends this idea … you refer to the worship of autonomy, uber alles, et cetera. It offends this idea that everything should be totally freely contracted. That comes with a lot of the modern mind. The idea that it’s almost an unchosen obligation for Grandma to help out is one of these things that can offend current sensibilities. So absolutely, community supports the norm of letting your kids run around some places. Here, though, some parents get in trouble from the other neighbors who are like, that’s irresponsible or the kids are trampling on the playing field.
So absolutely what you will find in Mormon communities, in Camp Mill, Maryland, in Israel, and then in a more abstract way in my own Catholic schools, which sprawl across the DC area, is this idea that we will help you raise your kids. You don’t have to watch them every minute. And it’s not just some individual choice that you made that’s your own problem. You’re part of the whole … you’re doing what you’re supposed to do and so, we’re going to back you up in that.
Lindsey: Yeah, and I don’t want to make this yearning for community, it can’t just be dismissed as nostalgia for the good old days or wanting to bring back a relative absence of economic opportunities for women so that they have to stay home. We can go forward. There are possibilities for encouraging healthier ways of living in the 21st century. And the huge surge in remote work, goaded by the pandemic, divorces decisions about where to live from where you work. You can live anywhere, and if you can live anywhere, then you can live with people that you like or people you’re related to, so-
Carney: Rather than just 25 minutes from your office, yeah.
Lindsey: Right, as close as you can afford to your job. So the possibility of co-living and co-housing arrangements really is becoming economically viable in a way that it hasn’t been for a long, long time. I see some hope there that if people are living in face-to-face functional communities where they’re helping each other and doing real practical stuff together, that just accomplishes all kinds of sociological good.
Carney: Yeah, and so I talk about co-housing. I talk about Israeli kibbutzim. And I just talk about them because I’m not an urbanist who knows the answer, but I do want to stir up that pot and get anybody who cares about family to think about that. So some of it is actual infrastructure. There’s not a sidewalk in front of my house. We need sidewalks, we need crosswalks. Some of it could be intentional communities and that sort of thing. So I just want people who think about co-housing or intentional communities or multi-generational living to start from the perspective of, “Wait a second, if we’ve got adults retreating from family formation and children are more anxious, let’s steer our thinking on this towards those questions.”
Lindsey: Right. Good. So I want to go back to the religion angle. The connection between religion and a culture of thriving families with lots of kids isn’t a coincidence. And I say that as a non-believer. Religion, whatever the specifics of the belief structure, calls us away from our usual absorption in the selfish and the fleeting to pay attention to the permanent things – faith, hope, love – and express gratitude for the miracle of creation. Children do the exact same thing. They call us out of ourselves. You have a wonderful section of your book where you talk about having kids as a cheat code for a virtuous life. God told us to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. And every morning you wake up with a house full of naked hungry kids. So virtue is easy, or not easy, but it’s straightforward.
Carney: Simple. Yes.
Lindsey: Yeah. So I know I’ve used this phrase that parenthood beat the selfishness out of me. I was born with a pretty measly endowment of empathy, and I cared more about books than most people, but children pull you out of your shell. So, I just want to say I love that part of your book, and I think that’s a profoundly important point, and that’s a profoundly sad aspect of the fact that there are so many fewer children now that kind of transformation isn’t happening like it can.
Carney: I mean we started by touching on the economic reasons to care about a falling birth rate. One step back from that is if … the falling birth rate reflects something our culture isn’t doing well. So again, it’s not just mean bus drivers, it’s we’re not supporting other people. We’re too atomized. Then finally, it’s bad for us to not have kids. And not everybody is called to have children. I’m a Catholic. We think priests, religious nuns, et cetera, are not called to have children. But as a society, we definitely need them. We need more than South Korea has, but that’s a direction that we’re heading.
So parenthood especially, but also just generally a world with kids, we can’t expect them to take care of themselves. We can’t expect them to always make rational decisions, and so the world gives us these opportunities for selflessness, allows us to see our own state of dependency. It erases the myth of real autonomy where a human being can manage his own life, in addition to-
Lindsey: Right. I mean, the moment you have them, you’re a hostage to fortune for the rest of your life, right?
Carney: Exactly. So I think we’re made better by having kids personally as parents and also, culturally.
Lindsey: You close the book by describing the “civilizational sadness” of societies that have deprioritized children and family. You start with an interesting example of post-war Germany, where a post-war baby boom did not happen. And you connect that, speculatively, but plausibly, to national war guilt and the deep-seated sense that the world really didn’t need more Germans right then, thank you. And you discern a similar kind of alienation in contemporary American culture, especially among progressives. America’s a white supremacy state built on slavery and genocide, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s burning and drowning the world in fossil fuel addiction and so forth.
Now, we’re starting to see a similar kind of alienation spread on the right. I mean, Taylor Swift, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed pop star with country roots, falling in love with the handsome football star – on a team with the politically incorrect name of the Chiefs no less – and you see significant swathes of the right just going haywire in revulsion. And beyond that, you’ve got the rise of this sort of misogynistic online right that says all of marriage is just a racket to emasculate men. I think this kind of civilizational sadness is more pronounced on the left, and that’s of great importance because people with left-leaning sensibilities dominate our cultural institutions.
So what they think gets broadcast everywhere, and the implicit message is, we don’t deserve to keep going. The world is better off without us. This is clearly a cultural dead end, and it’s also a vicious circle. Civilizational sadness leads to a world where kids are rare, and a world where kids are rare is objectively less hopeful and joyous than one where their laughter can be heard everywhere. I’m not going to ask you how do we break out of this downward spiral, but I’m just going to applaud your connection of this trend to the most profound questions of human life and what’s important. And the thing that made me most excited about wanting to talk to you is that here you’re dealing with these very, very important matters.
And you’re coming from an intellectual starting point as a believing Roman Catholic that is very different from my own. In years past, that difference and your social conservatism might’ve been much more salient to me and I might’ve said, you’re on one side and I’m on another side. Over the past few years, we’ve had these intellectual upheavals that have totally scrambled political and intellectual alliances and relationships. As a result, I spend a decent amount of time being really sad about people I used to admire and respect who I think have gone off the deep end. On the brighter side, I spend a decent amount of time being delighted by finding important common ground with people that I used to think of is on the other side.
And this conversation has been one of those delightful walks on the bright side. Well, we’ve just gone over an hour, and so I think we can wrap it up here. Tim Carney, let me congratulate you on an outstanding book. Let me urge all my listeners to check it out. Tim, thanks for being on with me.
Carney: Thank you very much.