Falling Birth Rates are Not a Crisis

Sociologist Philip N. Cohen debunks the pronatalist claims on both the right and left that falling birth rates spell disaster. Noting that pronatalism is a key feature of authoritarian states, Cohen warns that the adoption of the problematic 'fertility crisis' framing among liberals is paving the way for coercive right-wing policies, and why we must abandon this narrative. We also explore evolving definitions of family beyond the traditional model and why public-facing scholarship matters more than ever. Highlights include:

• Why framing low birth rates as a crisis on the political left can push policy toward coercive pronatalism when those incentive-based approaches fail;

• Why left-leaning policies like healthcare, education, housing, and childcare should be pursued on justice-based grounds, not in an attempt to raise birth rates;

• Why right-wing pronatalism is often tied to not just economic growth concerns but also to xenophobic, racist, and anti-feminist agendas that serve to entrench male dominance;

• Why fears of population collapse are overstated and overlook the realities of delayed childbirth and the unreliability of long-term demographic projections;

• How lower birth rates create additional resources and improved opportunities for younger generations;

• Why media's 'both-sides' framing of demographic debates leads to unqualified pronatalist proponents being amplified;

• Why we should consider taxing marriage, not subsidizing it, given the numerous benefits attached to marriage;

• Why academics should move beyond the ivory tower to share clear, engaging, and useful knowledge with the public as active 'citizen scholars' in a democratic society;

• How the core caregiving role of families endures even as their forms and definitions continue to evolve and diversify in the modern era.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Philip N. Cohen

• Article: What if Both Sides in the Birth Rate Debate are Wrong? by Philip N. Cohen

• Podcast: The Advantages of Declining Fertility with Vegard Skirbekk on the OVERSHOOT podcast;

• Podcast: The Other Significant Others with Rhaina Cohen on the OVERSHOOT podcast

• Podcast: The Power, Freedom, and Joy of Single Life with Bella DePaulo on the OVERSHOOT podcast

• Testimonials

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• TRANSCRIPT

  Philip N. Cohen (00:00:00):

  I tried to resist the framing of either left or right pronatalism that sort of seeks to establish an agreement or a consensus that birth rates are too low and then proceed to a left-right disagreement about what is the best way to address this crisis of low birth rates. The academic demography is quite uniformly in agreement that we do not have a population crisis from birth rates. The math of it suggests that if you have pretty low birth rates for a hundred generations, you might get down to a very small number of people. A hundred generations is really a long time. There's a lot of time to change our minds about how many children we want to have during that time, a few thousand years. And so I just don't think we should be worrying that today's young people are putting the civilization of a thousand years from now in jeopardy with their life choices.

  Alan Ware (00:00:57):

  That was Philip N. Cohen, sociologist and demographer who's bringing his research grounded expertise to the broader public about why the panic surrounding falling birth rates is unfounded and why pronatalists on both ends of the political spectrum are getting it wrong.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:01:22):

  Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's successive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative behavioral and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.

  Alan Ware (00:01:47):

  I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the forces underlying overshoot - the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now onto today's guest.

  (00:02:25):

  Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology and a demographer at the University of Maryland College Park, where his research and teaching concern families and inequality. He writes about demographic trends, family structure, the division of labor, health disparities, and open science. His commentary on topics ranging from race and gender inequality to parenting, poverty, and popular culture has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New Republic. His textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change is now in its fourth edition, and he's writing a book about population panic. And now on to today's interview.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:03:10):

  Hello and welcome to the OVERSHOOT Podcast, Philip. It is wonderful having you here.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:03:14):

  Thanks for having me.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:03:16):

  And Philip, as a sociologist specializing in the areas of families, demographic trends and inequality, your work overlaps in so many ways with topics that we explore on this podcast, and you've used your social media presence to push back against attacks on scientific expertise, including the disinformation that right-wing pronatalists have used to make their case for pushing traditional families. And you also challenge, like we do, the progressives who adopt the pronatalist birth dearth framing of reality to offer their own raft of pronatalist policies and incentives. Your scholarly work on the changing nature of the family aligns with our expansive view of what family can mean. There's clearly a lot for us to chat about today. Again, welcome to the podcast. It's going to be a fun conversation.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:04:08):

  Oh, good. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to it.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:04:11):

  So let's begin with a recent article you wrote for The New Republic titled, "What If Both Sides in the Birth Rate Debate Are Wrong?" And the subheading was "The right wants to steer women away from work and toward motherhood. The left wants to provide them with more state support, so it's easier to have children. We should refuse this choice." And that's the end of the subtitle. We totally resonate with your arguments in this article, and we'd love to get into a deeper conversation about your perspective. Could you help break down what both sides are saying and what your arguments against each side is?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:04:51):

  Yeah, thank you. I tried to resist the framing of either left or right pronatalism that sort of seeks to establish an agreement or a consensus that birth rates are too low and then proceed to a left-right disagreement about what is the best way to address this crisis of low birth rates. So if we don't accept that there is a crisis of low birth rates, then the conversation shifts dramatically in a few different ways at once. And that's sort of what I wanted to try to do. In a way, there is a general phenomenon of falling birth rates over the last couple of hundred years. And the crisis mentality flares up now and then depending on what's happening locally in both in time and space. So in the middle of the 20th century, most people were not panicking about birth rates being too low because population was growing really rapidly.

  (00:05:44):

  Death rates had fallen a lot. And so there was much more a problem of rising population as far as threats to the environment and hunger and poverty and so on. But overall in the long run, we were still having declining birth rates, and that's really where we still are. And then what's happened in the last 10 years or so in the US in particular has been birth rates started falling after what we used to call the Great Recession. Birth rates headed down after that recession and sort of the rebound never came that we sort of expected. So that has led to a more and more panicky thinking about falling birth rates. But why is this not so much of a crisis is population is still growing, still lots of people. If birth rates sort of stay where they are, if they stop right now in the whole world, population will never decline, but the assumption is that birth rates will probably keep falling in places where they're higher, especially Africa.

  (00:06:41):

  And if they keep falling in richer countries also, then eventually global population is going to decline. And how bad is that? How much of a crisis is that? It's really not established that it is a crisis. The math of it suggests that if you have below so-called replacement fertility forever, eventually there's no more people left. But if you have pretty low birth rates for a hundred generations, you might get down to a very small number of people. A hundred generations is really a long time. There's a lot of time to change our minds about how many children we want to have during that time, a few thousand years. And so I just don't think we should be worrying that today's young people are putting the civilization of a thousand years from now in jeopardy with their life choices.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:07:30):

  Yeah. Thanks very much for that background. And like you're saying, long-term projections that go anywhere beyond 30, 40 years are kind of useless because they can't really predict human behavior and social norms and environmental changes that inform those norms. You also provide great arguments for why we need to move away from this assumption that it's a crisis. Can you highlight what the rights arguments are because those are the loudest voices today and why they are wrong, and then also why the left joining this pronatalist chorus is wrongheaded?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:08:12):

  Well, like a lot of people in the US these days, I have spent some time reading about the rise of fascism in the 20s and 30s in Europe. I had not realized how much panic over low birth rates was a crucial driver of that rise of authoritarianism and specifically what came to be called fascism, that particular kind of authoritarianism. But it was very much embedded in an idea of nationalism, which treated nations as sort of organisms in themselves. And the birth rate of the nation was sort of the vitality of the nation as a body. And so the idea was our nation must be strong, we must have more children. It was partly literally, we need more soldiers for the next war, but more than that, it was, we have to outgrow France, we have to outgrow England. They're all trying to outgrow each other in anticipation of a global race for national dominance.

  (00:09:06):

  And of course, we know where that went. It was nationalist, it was racist and caused a gigantic world war. I mean, you could go back further, but really in the last hundred years, authoritarianism of all kinds has always been pronatalist, has always been we, our nation, our society needs more babies. And whether it was nation specific like Italy or Germany or sort of a supernational race view of Western civilization or the white race or something like that being outbred by the hordes of outsiders, it's been part of an authoritarian playbook. Okay. So that's on the right. The reason it serves their politics so well is their politics is the politics of nostalgia, of backward looking traditionalism, and they always point to feminism and women's liberation as part of the problem, part of the decay, the decadence. You see the things that they were saying in Germany about sort of the roaring 20s and it was all about sexual openness and women's liberation.

  (00:10:06):

  And next thing you know, they're wearing pants and using birth control. And so we're still, the right wing pronatalism really draws from that well. And there's more extreme right. The Elon Musk version of this is quite racist and very outwardly racist and the more moderate kind of sort of, Oh, capitalism needs eternal growth. And it serves their politics very well because what they're trying to do is they need a scapegoat for the problems of today that they alone can solve sort of in the words of Trump, I alone can solve it. And feminism and women in general are just sort of the scapegoat for that. And so even though it never works, that is they've never successfully raised birth rates, the politics is very useful to them. So they're happy to have a perennially losing position on this because they're about getting political power more than they are about actually doing anything about birth rates.

  (00:10:58):

  What they want to do is win people over to their political agenda, which includes male dominance in politics and society. Birth rates is one way to get there, but they never successfully raised birth rates. I mean, if you want to really look closely, for a couple years, Hitler did okay at raising birth rates. They promoted marriage, they gave big marriage bonuses. They gave people a loan when they got married, provided they were racially pure and they had no disabled people in their family tree, and the wife promised not to enter the labor force under those conditions. If they got married, they got a loan they could use to buy a house or something, and every child they had, a portion of the loan was forgiven. And they did have a little surge of marriage, a little surge of births for a couple of years. And I don't think it was really, in the long run, worth it, even if you wanted higher birth rates because it led to a gigantic World War.

  (00:11:49):

  Anyway, so aside from that little blip in Nazi Germany, authoritarians really never successfully raised birth rates. It's almost gratuitous to say they never succeed. They don't really want to succeed. They want to have the issue. They want to have feminism and women's liberation as a punching bag for their politics forever. That's on the right. Should I go onto the left?

  Nandita Bajaj (00:12:07):

  Yes, please. That's awesome.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:12:09):

  Well, I'm a leftist perspective myself, and a lot of the problems that people on left are concerned about, I am also. A lot of young people are very insecure about the future. They can't afford housing, they can't afford healthcare. They have student debt. They don't have adequate reproductive healthcare, and so including abortion and contraception and just sex education and so on. So there's like lots of things we should be doing better. I'm talking about the US specifically. And if we improve some of the problems in young people's lives, I think it is possible that some of them would actually have more children. Not very many more and not probably permanently more, but there would be some people who are right now not having a child they really want to have. I'm fine with that. I think that's great. People want to have families with children.

  (00:12:53):

  I think they should be supported in doing that. I'm happy to try to solve those problems, not because the goal is to increase birth rates, but because the goal is to make life better and let people live the lives they want to live and be have fulfilling, happy lives, which for some people might include a child that they're not having now. But I think the problem is once you adopt the frame that says, okay, we need to raise birth rates and this is how we're going to do it. Childcare, healthcare, preschool, housing subsidies, whatever it is, those things are not really going to work either in terms of having any big effect. Like I said, maybe small effects, temporary effects based on the research that we have so far. And then when they don't work, we're left with the consensus that we have a problem, and then we're back to the right-wing solutions.

  (00:13:35):

  Then it's sort of like the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is giving people what they want, like healthcare and childcare. When that doesn't work, I'm afraid the consensus pushes us back toward the hard way. Women out of the labor force stop subsidizing education, stop permitting abortion and so on. And so you end up with more coercive ... That's what I'm afraid of politically. And I admit that's kind of speculative, but I just don't want to give an inch on the framing because I know that if we end up aligned with the right-wing version, it's going to end up bad.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:14:07):

  Yes. Thank you for covering it so thoroughly. And the inherent agenda that both sides have not questioned is that of growth and that growth is good and that population growth is good, economic growth is good. And somehow it rings about something positive, but we've had so many ecological and poverty-studying economists who have talked about how most of the economic growth has really only gone to line the pockets of those who already have capital, who already are rich. So this assumption that population growth is needed to continue feeding the economy also doesn't question why the economy needs to grow beyond what the current population needs. And then also we are facing so many social and ecological crises. And the fact that those questions are not even present among these narratives is kind of astounding. And so yeah, I think to your point, even the progressives not questioning this growth this agenda leads then to basically the creeping in of right policies.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:15:19):

  I'm neither expert on the economics nor the ecological aspects of that, but I'm very sympathetic to that argument that you just laid out. And I do think inherently, from my lay perspective, infinite growth seems kind of impossible. And so we may as well face the reality that we're going to have to learn how to live in a low growth or eventually no growth mindset and just think beyond out-competing our peers as the mode of achieving success.That's at the most abstract level. But I think the more concrete things you mentioned are all very well taken. And especially the idea, people are very concerned, Oh no, we won't have enough workers to support old people and so on. If we don't have more babies, there's a very naive assumption that more workers doing more work produces more wealth for everybody. That's not really the model we've been pursuing for the last quite a handful of decades where increases in productivity and production have been producing dramatic inequality, a wealth inequality, and it's not rising all boats. It's missing the point.

  (00:16:21):

  The scale is really hard for people. I'll give one example about the scale of inequality that I've been trying to use to help people understand. I realize that if Elon Musk sold all of his stock, like the value of it would fall, but just take it at its list price. His personal wealth lifts every American child out of poverty for 10 years. That's one person's wealth. So the idea that what we need to do is produce more wealth is willfully missing the point anyway.

  Alan Ware (00:16:46):

  Right. And you've also written about some of your concerns with a book that has a lot of these growthist assumptions in it, Dean Spears and Michael Geruso's book After the Spike, Population Progress and The Case for People, a book in which they ask, "What if the challenge for humanity's future is not too many people on a crowded planet, but too few people to sustain the progress that the world needs?" And that's certainly an argument that we hear a lot of. And as you might expect, we certainly have our issues with Spears and his University of Texas at Austin Population Center that received $10 million in startup funding from Elon Musk, who's a famous depopulation panic promoter. And one of the fundamental arguments in Spears and Garuso's book, After the Spike, is a warning that birth rates below two children will lead to an ongoing and rapid exponential population decline.

  (00:17:38):

  And these kinds of warnings from sources seen as reputable like Spears piece has been featured in the pages of the Atlantic and New York Times and Washington Post helped stoke the population decline panic across the political spectrum, including the center left. And you've challenged Spears and Geruso's population projections and their degree of confidence in those projections. And you've offered some plausible alternative population projections of your own that show the decline may not be nearly as precipitous as they're assuming. So what do you think Garusso and Spears are getting wrong?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:18:13):

  Well, in some ways, a lot of the very specific things they say are accurate descriptions of population projections. And the issue is the confidence and the interpretation. Okay. So demographers have created an unfortunate situation with this concept of replacement fertility. Assuming the population is half male and half female, okay, just grant that assumption for the sake of discussion, every two people needs to have two children or else the population declines. And so that's right as far as it goes. The problem is the way that we measure total fertility rate is you take all the births in one year and then you sort of rotate that and assume society lives through that year over and over again. And that's how we get the projection of the total fertility rate. So you take yesterday's 18 year olds and you assume that they're going to behave like yesterday's 19 year olds, then they'll behave like yesterday's 20 year olds, and then eventually they'll behave like yesterday's 40 year olds.

  (00:19:09):

  And one thing that happens in particular in most parts of the world is the age at which women have children is rising. So when you take the look at who had babies last year, you have a lot of 20 year olds that are waiting. So they're not having a baby right now and you have a lot of 35 year olds who are done. So they're not having a baby right now. So when you put those two together, the number you get is very low. You get a low total fertility rate. But if those 20 year olds are actually just waiting, and if you're only aiming to have one or two, you do have time to wait in most cases. When you wait with good healthcare and enough resources, most people can have two children in their 30s, even their late 30s, even their early 40s, if they want to.

  (00:19:53):

  So we have this odd situation, and this is what demographers have tried to explain. It's called a tempo effect when the age is rising, the total fertility rate is artificially low. If you look back at Europe in the 90s, there was a big drop in the total fertility rate and a huge round of population panic, and it came up again 10 years later and people said, "Oh wow, the birth rates are rising again." And it wasn't really the birth rates rising, it was those women who waited reaching the older ages they were waiting for. Okay, so that's one issue. The other issue is the idea that once you get below two births per woman, you're on some inexorable slide. And that's what they say in the book. This isn't going to change. Once we get below two, it's sort of like any number below two may as well be zero in the way they talk about it.

  (00:20:37):

  You're below two, that's it. It's depopulation, sort of like in the same way that taking a step out your front door is like going to Mars. It's not depopulation. It is slowing population growth, possibly even population declines someday, but they have this idea that if you ever let it get below two, that's a crisis and we have to stop it now because it's going to become inexorable. So I guess I'll say two things about that. One is there's a huge difference between 1.9, 1.1, 0.7. These numbers below two are very different. I do think that the birth rate in Korea, which is very low right now, and part of it is this tempo thing of their rising age. If they end up having 0.7 children per family in Korea and no immigration, their society's going to be very different in 50 years and they're going to have to think about that.

  (00:21:25):

  Okay, that's absolutely true. That is very different from a US case where it's 1.6, 1.7. Part of that is tempo. If it stabilizes around this, we have no population problem for decades to even worry about. Even with their projections, their sort of main projection, we are in a couple of hundred years back to where the earth was in 2000. Nobody thought six billion people was too few last time we had six billion people. If we end up at six billion people again, there's no reason to think that's going to be so bad.

  Alan Ware (00:21:58):

  Right. You've also talked about the ability to predict. There's no inevitability to the future. The idea that you can just extrapolate 1.7, 1.8 hundreds of years into the future just is belied by history. I think you've written nobody predicted the baby boom, right? Fertility had been declining in the early 20th century and then a big boom.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:22:19):

  I cannot find anybody who predicted the baby boom. I mean, people understood that when all the soldiers came home, there would be a spike in births. And that's true, that happened. And it wasn't just the soldiers coming home to their wives, but it was not that they came home, they were young, they were single, they got married, like there were a bunch of births. Okay, that didn't surprise people, but 20 years of sustained higher birth rates, nobody predicted. Normally, things kind of go up and down more gradually than that. And so it's not crazy to think once it's low, it's going to stay low for a while. I don't have any reason to doubt that. Some people have called this the low fertility trap, which if you think it's bad, you could call it a trap. But think of it like there's no preschools. The corner store doesn't sell diapers.

  (00:22:57):

  Nobody's building playgrounds. Your friends aren't having children. There's a way that it could become socially normative to have fewer children and that would make it sticky at low levels. Seems totally plausible. On the other hand, the example of the baby boom is a great example of a totally unpredicted, massive increase in births. Our population today in the US is something like 50 or 80 million people more than it would've been without the baby boom. And that was just a totally unforeseen combination of things. During the pandemic, I thought, oh no, the pandemic will end and we'll have like the roaring 20s. Everything is going to be so great when the pandemic is over and maybe even the birth rate will rise, whether you think that's good or not. I thought maybe there's such a euphoria that people will have more children. This has not actually come to pass.

  Alan Ware (00:23:40):

  Yeah. And on this podcast, we certainly look at a lot of the future catastrophes that could be rolling at us due to our ecological overshoot that make the future trends that Spears and Geruso expect of kind of an endless growth situation being very perturbed by all kinds of catastrophes that would then affect the birth rates. I think you mentioned Katrina did have an effect locally there. We could have a lot of those kind of climate events.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:24:06):

  Yeah. One thing that happens is at whatever your birth rate is, if it's falling, you produce certain advantages for the next generation, which is kind of neat, which is sort of whatever we build out for the labor force of today, if the next cohort of workers is less, they have sort of a surplus of opportunities. It's sort of like the student teacher ratio is better all of a sudden if there are fewer kids. Whatever you're starting with, if there's fewer tomorrow, certain things are better. Some things are more difficult from a capitalist point of view. John Maynard Kane's had a whole thing about, oh, if population is falling, you can't assume sales are going to go up and it will hurt confidence. And there's a logic to that also, but there's certain advantages that you get from the demographic dividend we call from when population is falling, the next generation walks into sort of a space that has been cleared for them.

  (00:24:54):

  And it can be, you want to talk about adapting to aging society. We get advantages from our lower birth rate that actually are what we need to adapt to the aging society. Now we have more money to spend per child. If we have fewer children, we can invest in people who are productive, who are healthy when they get old, people who require less care when they're older. And we'd see this in Japan, the old people in Japan are a lot healthier than old people in the US. So you can do that better in ways that make the kind of care crisis much more manageable besides just sort of growing.

  Alan Ware (00:25:30):

  Right. We had a Vegard Skirbekk, a population economist on talking about the old age dependency ratio, that there's a health-adjusted dependency ratio that's quite good in a place like Japan compared to, I think Papa New Guinea, the average 75-year-old Japanese is the same as a 45-year-old Papa New Guinean in terms of the healthcare spending. A smaller labor supply, just according to law and supply and demand will mean higher wages and asset prices, which can be inflated and an unequal society full of old people that are sitting on these highly priced assets can help decline and that could be beneficial for young people. So yeah, we certainly agree. It has a lot of advantages for young and for the inequalities that have built up based on age in a lot of societies.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:26:19):

  At least gives us the opportunity to deal with those things. There's no guarantee.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:26:22):

  Yes, exactly. And even though we advocate for kind of a steady state or ecological wellbeing type of an economy, even within the current economic model, as you're saying, the panic doesn't really hold water because we've seen the labor force participation increase among people 65 to 74. Your point about people are living longer and healthier lives, wanting to stay involved and active within the workforce longer, but then also you see women's labor force participation increase as fertility rates have declined. So though there may be fewer workers being born, the workers who are not spending all their time reproducing and being at home caring for these children are more active in the workforce. So all of these pronatalist policies and the billions that are going toward encouraging women to have children that aren't really bearing fruit could very well be spent toward the social security and healthcare provision for everybody, especially the elderly.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:27:29):

  I completely agree. And that's very well put. And I would also add, it's either a deep misogyny or a careless misogyny, depending on how you look at it, the idea that we really need more workers in the future. So what we need to do is a policy that will take women out of the workforce. It's like, they're right there. They're working right now and you're saying, "No, no, what we need for them to do is to produce the workers of the future." Well, they're the workers of the present that are already born and raised and grown up and interested in, not to diminish the work of raising children, but they're doing lots of other things. Whatever you might spend to promote childbirth, whether it works or not, but even if you had more children, if people just decide to have more children, the cost of them is quite enormous.

  (00:28:14):

  And the benefit in terms of population composition or so on takes so long to arrive that you're really squandering the opportunity. When we've had falling birth rates from the past to the present, that demographic dividend, that opportunity we have is really now when we have people who are raising a small number of children and devoting themselves to other productive pursuits, they can get a lot done now before they're too old themselves or whatever. You're giving up that opportunity to address our challenges that we have today so that we can have a child born today who is finally done with college at 27 years from now, and that's the first child. And then if you do that for 10 years, the last one doesn't finish for 37 years. So all those years to turn them into productive workers, now their mothers are retiring. So now we've really squandered the demographic opportunities that we have now.

  (00:29:09):

  If you take this approach, and of course what society you're talking about, it makes a difference. But in the case of the US, with immigration, it's even more crazier to talk about a crisis of population and producing more babies now when there are just a lot of people who before the last year, a lot of people would have wanted to move here and could have moved here, could have been productive and happy, could have had successful exchange and sent money back to their families back home, could have had good global relationships and built a global care network and so on. And instead, we're going to lock them out and force women to live inside the wall on producing children, not how I would do it.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:29:47):

  Yes. I like how you talked about the deep misogyny or unintentional misogyny. We see a lot of that come out of the Institute for Family Studies. You've written about the director of the pronatalism initiative there, Lyman Stone and the unearned platform he's given in much mainstream reporting such as at NPR, which has referred to him as the "family planning expert." Why shouldn't people trust Lyman Stone as an expert on population issues and pronatalism?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:30:19):

  It's interesting. A little bit of background. The Institute for Family Studies really grew up in the era of marriage promotion. Before they were really heavily into pronatalism, they were into pro-marriage. And Lyman Stone is pretty young, so this predates him, but it doesn't predate me. So I've been arguing with one of the founders of the Institute for Family Studies, Brad Wilcox, and it used to be called the National Marriage Initiative that preceded them. And their goal has always been traditional families, what they call traditional families, which is really sort of like the 1950s family, which was kind of a weird aberrant era. But when you lock into that, stay at home mother, multiple children, monogamous, lifelong marriage with a working husband and Christian. And they don't insist that these people be white, but the model is based on whiteness as far as where it comes from and the implications.

  (00:31:07):

  So similar, like I said before, they never really succeed at raising birth rates. They never succeeded at raising marriage rates, and they never stopped or learned the lesson of that, but they had some big political victories on raising marriage rates. Under the second President Bush, they spent billions of dollars with the Healthy Marriage Initiative and marriage promotion at the federal level. They conditioned welfare for women who were trying to get support for their children. They made them take marriage education classes. They did all this stuff to promote marriage, absolutely zero results as far as increasing marriage. But they never stopped because the politics serves their nostalgic, patriarchal, political agenda. So now they've shifted to pronatalism, but that's very much of a piece. Okay. And Lyman Stone is a new actor in this. He's younger until very recently he was a graduate student in a sociology program.

  (00:31:57):

  And unfortunately, what happens in our media system is the both sidesing is very built in. You have an issue, you have to have both sides. To the extent that the academic demography is quite uniformly in agreement that we do not have a population crisis from birth rates. You have to look pretty hard to find trained professional demographers who are very upset about low birth rates beyond extremely low cases or whatever. But the idea that a society like the US 1.6 or something has a crisis of birth rates is not something you're going to find among many professional demographers. But we have these political people making this point. We have institutionally strong religious groups and political groups that are making this argument. And so if you're in the media like NPR or something, you're going to have both sides represented. The bar is just lower to be a pronatalist demographer, let's just say.

  (00:32:51):

  So to be a not pronatalist demographer, there's a lot of us, let's just say, who are dying to be on this podcast, which is great. And we've got a whole community, we talk amongst each other and so on. And then on the pronatalist demographers, there's just really not that many. And if you want one, you're going to end up calling Lyman Stone or Spears and Geruso at some point pretty soon. That's kind of a feature of our media ecosystem. And it's partly has to do with the deep pockets behind institutions like Institute for Family Studies, like the Population Wellbeing Initiative at University of Texas and so on. So building spaceships is really expensive, but hiring demographers is really not. Elon Musk gave $10 million to the University of Texas. You can change the lives of a handful of demographers for $10 million and throw in an open bar reception and we're willing to give your ideas a listen.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:33:45):

  Yes, indeed.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:33:46):

  I mean, I laugh, but if you look at the Epstein files situation, you see academics are easily some of them. You can find, if you've dangled the money, you will find the gullible, impressionable, sycophantic people who are willing to do stuff for money.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:34:01):

  Totally. Yeah. And we were surprised to see you featured alongside Malcolm Collins in a recent interview. And we were both like, What? There's you and there's Jennifer Sciubba from PRB, and then there's Malcolm Collins, and you are all supposed to be on an equal platform?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:34:20):

  Yes. Professional wing nut, Malcolm Collins. Yeah.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:34:24):

  Yes. And then to your point about what money can buy, just to go back to Dean Spears, Michael Geruso, they are also adherents of this really awful, weird philosophy, effective altruism. One of the tenets of effective altruism and longtermism is this utilitarian view that you could have a ton of miserable people who in total might equal greater utility than fewer people living healthier lives. And so we can't ignore the fact that effective altruism is also at the heart of Geruso's and Spear's argument for "the case for more people." It's a very utilitarian argument that ignores the billions who are currently living in poverty.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:35:13):

  And it's not accidental that this coincides with the rise of authoritarianism. Like the misogyny, there's a soft and a hard racism to this also. The hard racism is those specific people are bad. Somalians are terrible. Asians are terrible. That's just pure racism. And the soft racism is we have a population crisis and we need more people. And I'm going to just ignore the fact we are also deporting people and keeping out that people want to come here. On the longtermism thing, I heard Geruso speak about this and the more benign piece of this, which is you need a critical mass to kind of do some of the things we like. Like you can't have a big, beautiful art museum in a town with a hundred people. You're just not going to have the resources to build it. Well, fine. Honestly, if you lived in a village with just a hundred people, you might have other things you appreciated just as much as we love a big art museum, but that requires a little bit more playing around with your consciousness.

  (00:36:05):

  The one thing that I really don't like about birth rates and longtermism is the idea that a child who is never born exists as an unborn person who is being denied the right to be born. If people are never born, they're never born. They're not sad or happy about it. They don't seem to me to be actual people that we have to worry about, the people who are not born. So they talk about lives lost by not having births occur. And I don't think there's ethically any way that that is a reasonable burden to put on today's young people. The idea that they have an obligation to produce a person so that that person can be happy for a millisecond, even if they suffer for the rest of their lives. Just the ethics of it, I find very wrong.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:36:50):

  And all this talk about this need for human ingenuity that you just mentioned, how they call it the ultimate renewable resources, human ingenuity. Well, we don't talk about the hundreds of millions of children who are not in school, most of them in low income countries where fertility rates remain high, where women remain disempowered, and these are the same places with high rates of child marriage, child labor. There's a tremendous missed opportunity to invest not just in these children's basic rights to health and education, but also the innovation potential that they bring, not for the sake of some external agenda for innovation, but self-realization could be a very good goal for people. But that, again, is a inherent to longtermism and effective altruism is they don't challenge the systemic inequality built in that made them that rich.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:37:48):

  Yeah, I agree. I agree.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:37:50):

  And then I think if we come back to Lyman Stone for a second, you've also critiqued his and others' research that comes to the conclusion that being politically liberal leads people to have smaller families. What are your findings there?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:38:05):

  That's really interesting. It's complicated. It is true, especially in the US where right-wing ideology is associated with religion, right-wing people have more children on average in general. They get married younger, on average. On the other hand, there's an idea, some recent data shows among young people that this divergence appears to be growing. And that really goes to that issue I was talking about before with the age of childbearing, because the people that are more liberal when you ask them, what are your beliefs, are also more likely to be the people who are waiting to have their children. So right now, you look at people in their 20s and you see there's a pretty big gap in the number of children between people who say they're conservative and people who say they're liberal. If we follow those people for another 20 years, we may find that they all end up around two and it's not going to exactly equal out, but the gap may be lower than it appears right now.

  (00:39:01):

  On the other hand, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but you also have the reality that people change over their lives and their attitudes change over their lives. The Heritage Foundation has this idea that we should cut off education funding and women will stay home and have more children because they're wasting their young adulthood in school instead of having children. But the way people's lives actually unfold, which includes ideology, political views and attitudes and experiences, as well as attitudes towards marriage and relationships and childbearing and education, these all grow up together. So I can tell you, for example, women who have a baby in high school are much less likely to get a college degree. Okay. Well, that seems to be pretty clearly cause and effect. If you have a baby in high school, you're not going to have time and energy, you're become more likely to be poor, you're less likely to end up going to college.

  (00:39:54):

  Okay. But what about people get married when they're 20? They're also less likely to get a college degree and more likely to have more children, but all those things kind of happen at once for them. When they're making that decision to get married, they're heading off in a direction which is going to less likely to include college, more likely to include children, and more likely to include right-wing views. So you can't pull out one of these things and say, "Ah, ideology is causing a change in the birth rates." They're all growing up together. And it's also possible that when you have children, there are things about that life that may lead you to become more conservative over time. It may be who you're socializing with, including your partner, family members, church and so on. So there is a sense, and the Institute for Family Studies will tell you they want young people to get married and have children, partly because that brings them into church, which they think is a very pro-social thing, which will then help cement their ideology and their family beliefs and practices.

  (00:40:51):

  So all these things are all tied up together. So I would say it's not wrong that there's a correlation between ideology and number of children, but they kind of feel like this is a gotcha thing where liberals are going to breed themselves into oblivion by teaching people to be trans and not to have children and to not be married and stuff like that. And so they have a little triumphalism that conservatives are going to take over by having more children. Their children may teach them that that's not exactly how it works.

  Alan Ware (00:41:19):

  Yeah. And as you've spoken about their view of marriage, being very traditional working husband, stay at home mother with children, the religion, implied kind of white 1950s model of marriage that people like Brad Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies have been promoting. And you've also written about, discussed what they misunderstand about marriage, incentivizing it. What does the research show about that?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:41:47):

  Well, a very interesting thing has happened. When in second wave feminism, like in the 60s and 70s, there really was an assumption that when women got more education, better jobs and more integration, occupational integration, that they would end up with fewer children and not being married. This was going to be part of the women's liberation agenda, and it was part of the women's liberation agenda that they would not need to be married or become parents in order to be fulfilled and respected members of society and esteemed and so on. But a funny thing happened on the way to post-modernity, which was now we see that people, women in particular with more education and better jobs are more likely to be married and increasingly having children, still the case that poor people have more children in the US than richer people, but that gap is closing quite a bit.

  (00:42:38):

  And it's partly for the very good reasons of access to contraception. So it has come to be that marriage is increasingly for privileged people in the US. And there was a time when young people got married at the start of adulthood and then they saw where it took them. And now we're much more likely, partly because we have embraced the notion of really choosing a spouse and being happy with the spouse as a legitimate goal. People, especially women, want to wait longer to get married if they can. So like I teach college, I ask my students who are mostly women because they teach family and sociology, their plan is almost universally to finish college, start their career, then get married, then have children. And it's partly that they think they're going to have a better choice of potential spouses when they have increased their own sort of class standing.

  (00:43:30):

  When they're richer and better off, they'll find a better partner and be in a better position to raise children who are successful themselves and so on. So you have this kind of cycle where the people who are getting married are increasingly privileged. And what that has partly produced is, again, in this simplistic view, married people are richer, therefore people should get married and they will get rich. And that has been the view that the Institute for Family Studies and them have taken the idea that, oh, look, rich people are married, poor people are single. This goes very nicely with sort of a blame the victim view of poverty, that it's your choices that have made you poor. If you were married, you would not be so poor now. And it just misses the reverse causality there, which is that people are more likely to get married when they're rich or on their way to being richer.

  (00:44:17):

  And it's very interesting. I argue about this with economists. Economists love to imagine that people are making smart economic choices all the time, but when it comes to marriage, they don't. And Melissa Kearney wrote a book called The Two Parent Privilege about this where she was trying to figure out why poor people aren't getting married when being married is so beneficial. And I think they should slow down a little and ask themselves, if people aren't getting married, maybe the people who aren't getting married have actually figured out that the marriage options that actually exist for them are not going to be so beneficial. If you line up all the potential spouses in the world or in the society, and then from the best possible marriages to the worst possible marriage, you put the best marriages in the front, whoever they are, they all get married, they get married, they get married there, you work your way down the line.

  (00:45:02):

  At some point, the people who are left are looking at each other and saying, "This marriage is not looking so beneficial anymore, and they're less likely to get married." If the analyst only looks at those people who got married, you read the New York Times wedding announcement, he's a doctor, she's a doctor, he's doing his residency, she inherited a multinational toy company. They decided to get married and they had their wedding in the courtyard of their elite New England prep school. Okay, now you're going to take that group and say, "Oh, their average income is pretty high. Let's look at the single people. Their average income is pretty low. The only difference between them is marriage." It doesn't make any sense. So the idea that you could get into that group by just entering into marriage with the nearest person that you happen to be dating right now, no offense to that person, they're just not going to give you the benefit that we're holding up among the average married person. Anyway, there's a statistical problem, ideological problem, and it doesn't fit with how people actually run their lives.

  Alan Ware (00:46:00):

  Yeah. And I've read you discussing this kind of normative argument for marriage that the Ross Douthats and the David Brooks, and you say how this normative argument just keeps cycling back every few years. It was interesting, you were on Emily Oster's podcast talking about Kearney's book, and she was kind of arguing for well in the 50s, people just got married. There were stable families, children were born in marriage, and then you said, Well, how did that work out for the children of those born in the 50s who got divorced in the 70s? They looked at their mom and dads in these awful marriages that they weren't escaping and took a very different lesson.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:46:37):

  That family model did not repeat itself for a single generation. Whatever they taught their kids, it did not work. I mean, either they told them to run away from this or they tried to tell them to be like their parents and their kids didn't listen. It certainly did not work out that well. I mean, they produced a lot of children, those families. So if that's your benchmark, then they were successful, but it did not work as a mode of family life.

  Alan Ware (00:47:03):

  Right. And as you've mentioned, the structural inequalities where the working class has been decimated over the last 50 years and they're just, especially for women looking to have children, fewer marriageable men, right?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:47:16):

  Yeah. In the most simplistic way, I mean, it is true. If you take any two people and stick them together, you'd get an economies of scale benefit from pooling your resources. You can have one fridge, one car, one apartment or something, but the reality of marriage and family life is all the other accoutrements of life don't necessarily follow from that. And people who have hard lives also have hard relationships. And we should do all we can to help people in their lives. If we do that, it's a little bit like the birth rates. If we make people's lives better, it's possible that there would be more marriage, that people would have less substance abuse problems, which is terrible for relationships. If we could help address people's substance abuse addictions, including gambling addiction and everything else, it's possible relationships would do better and more people would be married.

  (00:48:09):

  I don't want to do that because we need a higher marriage rate. I want to do that because these people are miserable and have problems that we have the resources to fix if we wanted to.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:48:19):

  And yeah, on that note too, we've had other researchers, including Rhaina Cohen who wrote a recent book, The Other Significant Others. And then we've had Bella DePaolo on the other podcast Beyond Pronatalism whose book is called Single At Heart. And they've argued that just within the US, there are more than 1000 federal rights and benefits that privilege marriage and the market forces that do the same. So in the same way that pronatalist policies have always existed and in the ways babies and pregnancy are valorized in media and culture, to what degree relationships, romantic partners and marriage, the way they are valorized, push people to lifestyles that may not be conducive to them and demote relationships that may otherwise be far more significant than one romantic partner such as lifelong friendships and how much our policies discriminate against people who don't have a next of kin.

  (00:49:20):

  And so I wonder if in your work you see any patterns of the social norms that create certain narrow milestones for people. Even when you ask your students in class the order in which they might do things, how many people say, Well, I may not necessarily follow this path or that.

  Philip N. Cohen (00:49:37):

  Yeah, it's a really important question. I mean, there is a lot of chicken and egg aspects to it as far as the norms preceding the policies, the policies reinforcing the norms. Conservatives will tell you that there are some aspects of the tax code that penalize marriage. And it is possible there are some things where when you get married, you lose certain benefit, but you're absolutely right that there are a lot more things that bring you benefits from marriage. I actually think if I ran the zoo, one idea I would like to consider is the possibility of taxing marriage. Marriage provides all these benefits that people get. You've got someone to take care of you, someone to pack your lunch and take care of you when you're sick and support you in the community, valorizes you in this esteem that you get and you get all this multiplier effects or economies of scale.

  (00:50:21):

  And there's a lot of benefits to being married and people who aren't married through no fault of their own don't get those benefits. So what if we just tax married people and spread that resources around? For some reason, this idea doesn't catch on. But if you think about like social security, social security is a huge marriage incentive program. You get your spousal benefit if you're married. So we obviously do skew it a lot. And I do think, I mean, one of the things that is really a tension in family sociology that we're following, seeing over a long time is the direction of diversifying family relationships. So it's partly just from getting married later. People have young adulthood has been extended and there's more experimenting, more different kinds of relationships. There's an argument to be made that this had a lot to do with the emergence of gay rights and sexual liberation altogether is not locking people down into marriage immediately, allowed people time out of the house, away from their parents, but not yet married to have an adulthood where they could be more open to different aspects of themselves.

  (00:51:23):

  But when you look at the things that have changed in family life, which are, like you say, diversity in terms of cohabitation, other kinds of relationships, living apart together relationships. When we have studies of people who don't have children, some people just aren't interested in children. Some people really like children. They don't want to have children, but they love the children in their lives, their friends and relatives' children, the children they have mentoring and caring relationships with for their whole lives. And those are things that demographers don't see very well because we have a household definition of families always. So if you're in the census, no one has a relationship with anybody who doesn't live with them in the census. That's just the way that modern census has emerged. So you can be single and living next door to your life partner and the census doesn't know.

  (00:52:10):

  Unless you say you're married, then they would call you married spouse absent. You're married, but your spouse is not present. But that's not really the way it works. Really, we have all kinds of complicated relationships that our institutions don't pick up on that well. The good news is that we're innovating constantly on family diversity and coming up with new ways of living. One of the things that happens when you have people living longer and having fewer children, and I ask my students this, how many people have a close long-term relationship with a grandparent or a great-grandparent? If you have people are living longer and you don't have eight siblings, you have people who have two or three grandchildren that they have a relationship with for 40 years, and that's a long, close, caring relationship that they're going to be someone they're going to be actually happy to share with their wealth and resources with perhaps.

  (00:52:58):

  So the idea of trying to roll all this back into a traditional model, it's not practical, it's not going to work, but partly what it shows then is the intention of that is really oriented towards I keep coming back to nostalgia, patriarchal nostalgia in particular, the idea that, oh, everything is going wrong. People assume the divorce rate is always rising, the crime rate is always rising. This is not true. These things are not actually happening. And if only we could, the David Brooks thing, if only we could go back to a period of close-knit families where you borrowed a cup of sugar from the person next door and everybody had the same family structure and everybody understood what everything meant and there was no ambiguity and everything was clear and everybody's gender was stable. All those people who got married when they were 18 or 19 in the 50s, half of them were pregnant and it was not necessarily their first choice of who to marry. And all this, it just misses the opportunity to innovate really, which is what people seem to be good at.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:53:56):

  And then on another demographic thread, many surveys, including the general social survey used in various social science research projects, as well as by the UN, ask people what they think the "ideal family size" is. When actual family sizes don't match this ideal, commentators across the political spectrum often sound the alarm. What are some of your concerns with this survey question about ideal family size?

  Philip N. Cohen (00:54:27):

  Well, it's a very important part of the liberal pronatalism is the idea that people are having fewer children than they want. And that's a way of defining it as a problem. Instead of sort of a macroeconomic definition or something like that, you can say, Well, but if you ask people, they're not having as many children as they want, so that's the problem that we should solve. It's a very difficult thing to ask people. Just a simple question, how many children do you want? For one thing, at what age do you ask somebody that? So there's a long-running survey called Monitoring the Future, which has been asking high school seniors, If you could have any number of children, how many children would you have? And I was just looking at the class of 1997 who were born about 79, so they're just about finishing their childbearing years now.

  (00:55:08):

  And they had just about two children on average, but in high school, and when they filled out this survey, the number they reported was about two and a half on average. So this cohort has ended up a little below what they said they wanted one day in high school when they filled out a survey. They also thought they were going to graduate college at much higher rates than they did in the end. They had an ideal expectation, which was the majority of them said two was the number of children they wanted, and they would definitely plan to finish college and so on. And life happened in between. So one problem with the ideal family size is it's very abstract and it reflects an ideal that is not the same as a desire or an intention. The practical reason, this may be too technical as far as how surveys work.

  (00:55:54):

  The general social survey is a survey of people of all ages, including people who are done having children, and they needed a question that they could ask everybody. If you just ask, How many children are you planning to have? you're wasting the resources of the general social survey because you've got all these 50, 60, 70 year olds in there and that's not a useful question to ask them. So they ask an ideal family size question. Problem with that is now you're asking 80 year olds, what's the ideal family size? And they grew up a long time ago and they had a whole different experience. That's one problem. The other is it's ideal. But even if you ask people, and so more specific surveys that only ask people in their childbearing years, How many children do you want? How many children do you intend to have?

  (00:56:35):

  Now you've got a 30 year old who already has one child and even if they didn't intend to have that first one, they're not likely to say they don't really want the first one. Now their life changed. They probably love that kid and now you're trying to establish what they really want from that point forward. There's almost no real way to ask this question unless you ask, Are you currently frequently having sex without contraception on purpose? Then we can be pretty sure you understand how it works and you are trying to have another baby. And we do study that. And so we have measures for stuff like that, but that doesn't get you at a sense of what is the sort of ideal. So I just don't think it's useful to use the ideal measure to benchmark it against what people are already happening.

  (00:57:20):

  And another aspect of this, and this comparison I realize comes across as kind of crass, but it's sort of like, what's the ideal number of yachts for a family to have? I think I would love to have a yacht that I could just go use whenever I wanted to. I probably never will, and it probably won't be one of my big regrets. I hope by the end of my life, like, yeah, maybe if things had turned out differently, I would've had a yacht, but I didn't, but I still think the ideal is one. And I don't mean to turn children into a consumer product like that, but there is a sense at which there's an ideal. And then one thing that happens is for young people, they have an ideal, and then you introduce them to a career that they find very rewarding, or it turns out to be harder to find a spouse than they thought, or they find that their ideal spouse doesn't want children.

  (00:58:07):

  All these things can happen where they don't end up with the ideal number of children, and this is not reflective of a public policy failure if they don't end up with that number of children. That said, I do think that if people really want to have children, we should support them. And I'm not too worried that attitude is going to produce too many children. If we threw up in the floodgates and we said, We will support you no matter what, I don't know that the birth rate would actually rise that much, but I would rather do that than this pressuring people to have children and not support them.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:58:37):

  And we see that in so many Scandinavian countries that are leading the charge on having really generous parental leave policies, childcare policies, healthcare policies, which as you argue, and we argue, those are basic things that should just be included in policies because they're good for people without discriminating against people who don't want or have children or don't want to and aren't married. So those are just good policies, but we don't see them being able to reverse the trend of falling birth rates either. And your other point about the life course change that happens within people's lives. I mean, I'm a great example. If somebody had asked me in high school or even in university how many kids I think I should have or want, I would've said what was expected of me from a cultural perspective, coming from an Indian cultural background, I would've said two, because that's the only thing I ever knew.

  (00:59:36):

  And it wasn't until my late 20s that a conversation with my partner made me realize that I actually had a choice that I didn't even know, and we ended up having zero by choice. And so Lyman Stone might see that as an unfulfilled desire of an 18-year-old me that didn't get to have the two children I think I should have had. But other demographers have also talked about socially embedded preferences as a form of social pressure, that whatever everyone else around you seems to be doing is considered to be the norm. And therefore in order to belong and not be ostracized and stigmatized, you should do it even if you don't want to do it. And some people like me in my 20s don't even know that they have the choice to not do it. We see in a lot of high fertility countries in public or even in surveys, this kind of socially embedded preference has been so deeply internalized that people are afraid to say what they really want, but in private conversations, they would be more open to say, If I could have not four, but two, that could be nice. So I think your explanation around this idea of ideal family size further undermines to whatever degree we can make authentic choice in a cultural context.

  Philip N. Cohen (01:00:59):

  It's interesting. In the demographic transition, the idea of the death rate falls first and the birth rate falls later, that gives us one model, one understanding of how norms change. When children start surviving more, it eventually becomes the practice to have fewer children, partly because if you need or you're used to having a certain number of children of a certain age, to have that many, you have to bear more than that. At some point, then that becomes expected, Oh, we're going to have six children. But if you really only need four, then once you realize they're all surviving after a generation or two, the norm sort of shifts. It's not so mechanical. There's a give and take and it has to do with other factors and so on. But there's also a long-term and a short-term aspect to that. One way to look at human history is that throughout the history of our species, like one of the great struggles of all time has been to control fertility, to have fewer children.

  (01:01:59):

  And whenever it's become possible to do that, that's what we do. So it doesn't happen. It's not automatic. And if you'd given a survey in 1200, I don't know what people would've said about how many children they wanted, but it's definitely the case that as soon as it became possible, they had fewer. Now that doesn't go forever. And we have all this great evidence. The societies with lower birth rates are on average, happier, healthier, richer, like lots of things are better in societies with lower birth rates. Within those societies though, the people who want to have children and can't maybe sad and have problems that they have health problems and other kinds of problems that we should try to address. But you don't want to confuse that with the general fact that lower birth rates are part of what makes society better. And the norms are, it's job security for sociologists and anthropologists and people who study culture is they're a mystery.

  (01:02:51):

  I mean, they evolve slowly. And embedded is a great way to talk about them because we don't even see how they ... I don't know where my ethical ideas come from exactly. And so that's sort of a part of what makes it fun to be human in a culture, not just as a human individual.

  Alan Ware (01:03:07):

  We appreciate that you share your expertise very publicly on your blog. And you've made a point really of being a public intellectual on a lot of these issues. And you've written about the growing distrust of experts and expertise in many societies and a more generalized distrust of expertise writ large. And we've got distrust of government media, medicine education, and a growing distrust of scientific and university establishment where you live as a sociologist. And you've recently written a book titled Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientist. Could you give us an overview of what a Citizen Scholar is and why you think we need them so badly right now?

  Philip N. Cohen (01:03:52):

  Well, thanks for mentioning the book and asking that question. At some point in my academic research, I kind of started to get a little angsty or a little bit feeling like I could keep discovering new knowledge and I wasn't confident enough that that was actually going to change the world in important ways or I felt there was so much that we already knew that wasn't being used fruitfully. So at some point I shifted my career in the direction of trying to figure out not just how to discover new things in a scientific sense, but how to communicate about them, how to change our model of how we go about identifying research questions and problems and how to address them and the more interactive mode of doing social science essentially, which the Citizen Scholar idea, it's not an original idea, but it's just their citizenship, which is our role in society, not the legal sense of a legal citizen, but just our place in a human community and their scholarship, which is both learning and developing new knowledge.

  (01:04:51):

  So Citizen Scholar is just someone who learns and deploys knowledge as part of their practice of being a citizen. So I want to have my social science be useful and interesting to people. I don't want it to be just the rarefied discovery of knowledge. Some people work that way, not so much me. And I do think those of us who are social scientists have to think about the question of trust because even if I am just down in the basement playing with statistical models and I don't want to be involved in society, really, I'm just building something, leave me alone. I can only do that if the society supports that endeavor somehow, whether it's the government through the National Science Foundation or something, or even through a billionaire philanthropist who's getting a tax credit by giving money to the university. However it is, the society is supporting that to some degree.

  (01:05:41):

  I favor the more public democratic mechanisms of doing that. I think it would be better for us if we had democratic means of deciding what were important research questions and what to support and study. We support education, we should support research, we should support both of those things. And I don't like to hold us up in a superior way, but I do like to imagine that the search for knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge is an important role in modern society and deserves community support, but we have to earn that. I can't just demand it and expect people to be happy to pay for it and then listen to us talk about what we've discovered. And what this all practically means, and demography is actually a good way to talk about this, is we have to pay more attention to who can access our research, who can read it, are we helping to explain it?

  (01:06:31):

  Are we listening to what people think about it when we pick the next research question? So not just disseminating, throwing copies out the window of the ivory tower and letting people read it, but also actually paying attention to what they think after they read it. So I want a more active, engaged, interactive kind of social science. And one way that we do that, demography is a good way, is descriptive work. If I can figure out ways to explain what is actually happening with population, birth rates, death rates, marriage, and so on, migration, if I can find a way to communicate that, then I'm doing my job as a social scientist in addition to devising some new formula or discovering something brand new. I might just be finding a new way to communicate something that actually works and gets people to understand the situation better. And finally, the final piece of that is I also think it's my role as a citizen to express my opinion about things.

  (01:07:23):

  I don't want to forbid myself from doing that because I'm supposed to be an objective social scientist. So I'll tell you my opinion. If I think Trump is terrible, democracy is good, abortion should be a right, immigration should be more free. Those are my personal opinions. I might support them with my research, but I'm going to allow you to decide, Hey, if you think my research is no good because I support abortion rights, then that just makes it a little harder for me to convince you that my research is good and I'm okay with that. I'd rather have that struggle than have to live with myself not advocating for the things I think are important. So that's kind of what I tried to get at in the book and I have some how to do it kind of stuff in there. And I don't know if we can get out of this problem, this crisis of expertise in science.

  (01:08:06):

  Science has done a lot of things bad and we deserve to be mistrusted in a lot of ways, but I do think it's an important part of a democratic society. I imagine that if we're more open and engaged and listened to people, we have a better chance of preserving the institutions of science and research and I hope we can hope we deserve it.

  Alan Ware (01:08:27):

  Yeah. You had mentioned in a presentation how we trust elevators to work and airplanes and there are all these unseen institutions behind the scene that enable us to trust these very complicated processes that we rely on in our life and we trust the police to basically protect us and schools to teach us and hospitals to care for us when we're sick. All of that requires trust. And to the extent that that gets continually eroded, social cohesion becomes harder to maintain. And I think you're approaching the university has to be worthy of the trust and being open, transparent as you are. And like you said, giving more credence to description, not always pushing ahead the frontier on something a lot of people don't care about and they'll never hear about just describing reality really clearly to people so that we can make better decisions. So yeah, I think it's critical that we have more scholars that are attending to their role as citizens and to the rest of us citizens, because there is so much useful knowledge in the academy that just never gets out.

  Philip N. Cohen (01:09:33):

  If we're having a crisis of confidence in elevators, we might need elevator engineers to actually take turns riding in elevators with people and explaining how it works. Americans take for granted the census that we can answer a question like, What is the unemployment rate in Westchester County? And they think they can cut the budget of the census in half and lay off all the bureaucrats and still just Google what is the unemployment rate in Westchester County and you can't or the birth rate. These things that are part of the infrastructure of modern society take investment and require trust. We have to train people and we have to employ them. And I also think when we saw the Musk people, the DOGE people come into the federal government with their computer science skills and their absolute cluelessness about how the world works, I also want to make the case that our engineers and our statisticians should also study history and do creative writing and read Shakespeare.

  (01:10:29):

  And there's this case to be made, but it's hard to make that case that we can't just treat education purely instrumentally like, You know what? You can cancel three quarters of the classes you're taking in college, just get a certificate in AI prompt engineering. That's all you'll need. If we want this model of general education where there's cross-fertilization, where the elevator engineer who's explaining how things work to you has also studied some anthropology, then we have to do the work of making that system intelligible to people. And I can dream anyway, I'd like to imagine we can find a way to do that and I have to at least act on the assumption that it's somehow possible.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:11:07):

  Yes. And as our final question, we produce the podcast you may know Beyond Pronatalism, Finding Fulfillment with or Without Kids. And this is where we have guests from around the world who share how they are navigating pronatalist pressures or even as we said, socially embedded preferences and how they are defining family on their own terms, whether that means being single by choice, being childfree, being childless, having kids, adopting kids, fostering kids or animals, or creating close-knit communities of friends and loved ones. And you are the author of a popular textbook now in its fourth edition titled The Family: Diversity, Inequality and Social Change. And as a social scientist who studies families, how do you see the meaning of family being redefined today?

  Philip N. Cohen (01:12:00):

  Well, thank you for that question and mentioning that book. I appreciate that. I made an interesting, to me, interesting choice when I first wrote that book, calling it The Family, and it's partly because academic family scholars had started pluralizing that term and talking about families instead of the family, which I appreciated because the point was there's not one kind of family and we shouldn't act like there is. When I called it The Family, what I wanted to say was there's not one kind of family. What there is, is an institutional arena where we do family stuff, family-like things, where we have caring relationships, where we have loving relationships, where we have roles and obligations that are a combination of formalized and informalized, that are maybe prototypically represented by the most common roles of parent, mother, father, siblings, and so on. But once you start playing around with the roles, the relationships, the kinds of obligations and identities that form, you realize as people do, as they innovate, you realize there's a lot of different ways of doing this, of doing the stuff that goes on in that arena.

  (01:13:08):

  I think of an arena like a sports complex, like a soccer field or something where there's a formal, there's one way to do it, there's an official way, but you know what if you only have enough players to have four on a side? You work it out. You make the goal smaller, you might make the field smaller, so on. We adapt all the time. So the meaning of families today is really about the diversity of families and the discovery of new kinds of relationships and ways of doing it, which there's also a strong inequality element. Families are a way that resource poor people have been able to overcome or adapt or deal with a lot of their hardships have been by cooperating in complicated ways with neighbors and relatives, extended families, and so on forever. At the same time, the ability to live alone without a family if you want or to escape a bad family if you need to, that's an important piece of inequality too.

  (01:14:04):

  Some people are trapped in their bad family situations because they have no way out. So that's the kind of inequality also. So some people can't find a spouse. Some people have a health problem and can't have children. Some people can't get out of a bad relationship. I don't idealize families either. They're both great things for us. And also for people who are living the worst kind of lives possible, it's often because of stuff happening in their families or stuff that once happened in their families. And then social change is diversity, inequality, social change. Social changes, the ground is always shifting on this. And I take kind of a perspective on modernity that says, once you open the box of modernity, you take the lid off, you start to identify individual roles and relationships, then things open up for negotiation in ways that they were not before.

  (01:14:54):

  Again, not to over-idealize modernity, but the cool things about it are that we've discovered the secret of individuality as a legitimate way of defining our hopes and dreams and happiness and so on. So that's what I'm trying to get out of that book. Mostly, it's just been a way for me to teach sociology of families to people for about 15, 20 years now. And teaching is a great way to ... It doesn't literally keep you young, but it keeps you in touch with younger people and young people and their families and their hopes and dreams are just always entertaining and enriching for me. So I really enjoy it. And I think we're in a bad way right now in the United States with education, with research, with the war on science, there's a real problem with higher education right now and the institutional attacks on it.

  (01:15:41):

  And I just think we have to get the best result we can from trying to reach people and make it meaningful to them and so on. So I'm trying to meet students in a way that works for them and interests them and hopefully they end up getting something out of it.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:15:53):

  Well, this has been a really incredible conversation. We went so many different directions and we really appreciate your flexibility and thought. And yeah, thank you for being such an effective communicator. You're obviously very successful at being a citizen scholar, and we've really benefited from your commentary. So thank you so much for doing that and thanks for your time today.

  Alan Ware (01:16:19):

  Thank you, Philip.

  Philip N. Cohen (01:16:20):

  Well, thank you very much. It was a great conversation. I really appreciate the attention you gave to, I mean, obviously to the issues that you always pay attention to, but to this conversation too. So thank you so much.

  Alan Ware (01:16:30):

  That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without this support of listeners like you, and we hope you'll consider a one-time or a recurring donation.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:17:00):

  Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.

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