Lyman Stone is a talented demographer now affiliated with the Institute for Family Studies' pro-natalism initiative. Your correspondent had interacted with Stone previously on X and other online fora, but hearing him talk, as we had the pleasure to do at the Foundation for American Innovation's Reboot Conference in San Francisco two weeks ago, is a different experience. Meeting Stone is like meeting an advanced AI designed to bury you in facts and insights about the social science of fertility and natalist policy.

At his panel, Stone made a very straightforward case: namely: (1) dropping fertility levels are bad; (2) more babies are good; (3) therefore we should support more babies; (4) pronatalist policy can be effective; (5) therefore we should support pronatalist policy. All pretty obvious stuff to your correspondent, but it is in fact the case that each of these points is controversial in contemporary Western society. Stone's intervention marshalled many findings we either weren't aware of or didn't think of in that context, in support of these points. Here's the ones we managed to write down in spite of his 200-word-a-minute rate.

"Babies as Industrial Policy"

Stone provocatively described babies as "industrial policy", pointing out that there is a link between fertility and infrastructure spending. When deciding whether a piece of infrastructure is economic, you project costs and cashflows several decades, and whether you expect the population to grow or not makes a difference to whether a given project is economic or not. Stone noted that much of the U.S.'s infrastructure was built during periods of high birth rates. Stone argued that Israel's famously dynamic high-tech, entrepreneurial, export-driven economy and family-oriented culture are actually two sides of the same coin, of Israel's "cultural sense of mission." If you have been to Israel you may find yourself agreeing much more strongly than otherwise, but your correspondent is in the first case.

What Drives (In)Fertility

Stone reiterated a well-known finding that the strongest predictor of fertility is religiosity—or rather, he specified, adherence to Abrahamic religions specifically is the strongest predictor of fertility, which we did not know (sorry Buddhists!). He presented stark contrasts in fertility rates: Weekly religious service attendees have 2.1 children per woman while non-attendees have 1.2 children per woman. Notably, he said, this gap has widened over the past two decades. Twenty years ago, while attendees maintained a rate of 2.1, non-attendees had a higher rate of 1.7, indicating a significant decline among less religious populations.

The other biggest driver of fertility is square footage of house. However, what that means is changing. The same square footage can have fewer rooms per family, and increasingly housing is designed for childless lifestyles rather than accommodating larger families. For example, the contemporary preference for open-plan houses may discourage larger families as, he said humorously, "wherever you are, the baby can hear you." We heard a similar point from an expert on social housing awhile back, who noted that square footage does not directly correlate to number of households you can host, since when much of the housing stock was built the average eligible household was two parents and two children, whereas today it is either a single mother or a lone retiree.

Stone also confirmed another well-known finding: exposure to Western media correlates with lower fertility rates. This effect has been observed worldwide, including studies at the former East German border, where a direct link could be observed between families having access to Western German media in a certain area and lower fertility. Western media communicates to third-world audiences a "cultural package" of what makes for the (more successful, wealthier) Western lifestyle, and this includes families with fewer children, higher parental investment per children, and a model of education based on fostering the child's self-expression rather than authority and tradition. Therefore, Western media communicates to these audiences, and whether or not that is the intended message, surveys show they do receive this message, that if they want to be as rich as Western people they must have fewer children.

Stone did confirm that fertility is dropping like a rock everywhere, including (rebutting a common objection) in sub-Saharan Africa. Current African fertility rates are significantly lower than those of Europeans at comparable income levels historically. Africans today are having around 4 children per woman whereas Europeans, when they had a comparable income level, were having 6 or 7 children per woman. He pointed out that the fertility crash in Africa is particularly worrying for that continent, as future generations would have to care for an aging population without having first developed the resources to do so.

Yes, Policy Can Help

If you talk to someone who is only superficially informed about this debate, he may say that fertility decline may be deplorable, but also that every possible policy has been tried, and that it has been found (your fictional interlocutor asserts confidently) that none of them work.

Not true, says Stone, equally confidently. "Children are not magical, they're a normal good like everything else. Give people money, they'll buy more of them, but they're a really expensive normal good, so you won't see a big effect right away."

Stone is the author of a great paper we have previously written about comparing France with its European neighbors and demonstrating (as well as the tools of social science allow us to demonstrate these sorts of things, anyway) that France's pro-family policies starting in the 1930s have indeed been effective, and that millions of Frenchmen are alive today who wouldn't otherwise be without pro-family policies. Stone also notes that the teaching from France is that these policies gain more effect over time as they compound: you get slightly more babies in the first generation, but these extra babies, once grown up, also have slightly more babies, and so on.

Pro-natalist policy is therefore fundamentally about long-term orientation: the results at first are small, but they compound, so that after several generations they can totally transform a country.

Stone cited other examples. It is well-known that in Israel religiosity drives much of the differences in birth rates. It is slightly less-well-known that Israel has some of the strongest pro-family policies in the world. And—and we were not aware of this: secular Jews in Israel have higher birth rates than secular Jews outside of Israel, and Hasidic Jews in Israel have higher birth rates than Hasidic Jews outside of Israel, showing (or so Stone said) that it's not just religiosity driving birth rates, it's also policy.

Another famous-to-nerds-like-us story is the country of Georgia, where the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church announced that he would personally baptize and become the godfather of any third or subsequent child born to married Orthodox couple in Georgia—a policy which was followed by a massive birth spike. This shows that culture matters, and that people do respond to incentives.

Stone also discussed the famous case of Hungary. Hungary seems to embody the case against pro-natalist policies, since they spend an eye-popping 4% of GDP on pro-family policies and birth rates keep declining. However, this is misleading, Stone argued, because only certain cohorts of the population are exposed to these policies. Time-adjusted fertility rates in Hungary are rising, likely due to family-friendly policies, Stone said.

Another example Stone discussed where policy may have an impact, which we hadn't thought of, which is the issue of miscarriage. According to Stone, miscarriage occurs in 15-20% of detected pregnancies, with rates potentially as high as 30% in some cases. He pointed out that for women experiencing recurrent miscarriages, blood clotting is often the underlying problem. This insight has led to the practice of prescribing aspirin to pregnant women, as it can help reduce blood clotting. However, Stone noted that this intervention typically occurs only after several miscarriages have already occurred. This seems like a very low-hanging fruit in helping people have more babies, and in the process enormously alleviating the great human suffering that is involved in miscarriage. More generally, focusing technology and medical research on reducing miscarriage could have a tremendous impact on birth rates, and human flourishing more generally. We thought this was a very exciting possibility.

The Bottomline

The bottomline is: babies are good, we are making less of them, which is a disaster, and we should be making more of them, which would be a very successful form of industrial policy. How do we get more babies? Culture matters tremendously, yes, but policy can and does also make a difference. These are important things to keep in mind for policymakers.