High Income, Low Fertility - Melissa Kearney | Maiden Mother Matriarch Episode 172

Hello and welcome to main Mother Nature Ark. My guest today is Melissa Kearny. She's professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Two Parent Privilege "How Americans Stop Getting Married" and started falling behind. We spoke about the experience of raising children in a low fertility society, why feminists really ought to care about prunatalism, the cause of the massive recent decline in teen birth rates, and why young women deserve to be given better information about their fertility options. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you find the conversation as interesting as I did. Melissa, you've got this new working paper which has just come out this month as we're talking about this phenomenon that I'm obsessed with. Listeners will know I'm obsessed with about why fertility rates are falling basically everywhere in the world. They are falling everywhere in the world. It's more that some places they fall below replacement, almost everywhere, with a few exceptions. What you do in the paper is really just go through all of the plausible explanations and all of the factors that we see correlating with this. Well, I don't want to give the game away in terms of your confusions, but maybe we could start by talking about the pill because I must say my assumption when I first started thinking about this issue some years ago, and a lot of people's assumptions is, "Oh, well, it's obviously the pill." Because the pill arrives in the 60s-ish and also decriminalized abortion and then you see this happening at exactly the same time and it says, "Well, that's obviously it, but I think it isn't obviously it, right?" I think it isn't obviously it. It's obviously a contributing factor. I mean, the unsatisfying thing about our paper and our conclusion, I think for a lot of people, will be, "There's really no one smoking gun that's like this is it, but what we really try to do." And like you said, run through all the plausible explanations, but also look really closely at the patterns and the data and the empirical evidence that's out there. And what's challenging is a lot of the points in different directions and more so than not, really what we're seeing in the data or the evidence is, you know, it refutes a lot of easy explanations. So if we think about the pill, that's a great example because that would make a lot of sense. Oh, it's access to modern contraception. I came at this question really interested in what's been going on in the US. And in the US, after the pill was introduced in widespread, after women entered the workforce in large numbers, we still had pretty high birth rates for a really long time. So I came at this question asking, "Why have birth rates plummeted in the US post-2007?" That's long after the pill. And so a lot of the explanations that people put forward to why birth rates are down have to do with access to modern contraception or, you know, larks or women working. But in the US, that all happened. And it sort of, it makes sense that birth rates in the 80s were lower than they were in the 50s. But why they're so much lower in 2020 than they were in 18, 1890, 2000, I think is an open question. And then when you look across other countries too, I actually think it's helpful to think about high income countries differently than developing countries. Because in developing countries, we do have different, you know, there, it's more plausible to me, but I'm not an expert in what's happening in those countries. But in those countries, it's more plausible to me that women's autonomy advances in access to modern contraception or the take-up of contraception is a more proximate cause. In the US, I think we need new explanations because those sort of happened already. Yeah, I mean, it's this really strange thing when you look at birth rates in the developing world, and you'll find places like regions in India, for instance, which have birth rates to rival Sweden. Right. Just like being, you know, having a G people capture of like a 20th of Sweden or something like that. So they're, they're really different and yet they have incredibly low birth rates. I mean, I think, oh, you know, a lot of people are shocked and know that now the birth rate, the fertility rate in Mexico was lower than that in the US. For instance, right. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of places. Well, the US was an outlier for quite a long time because it did manage to sustain higher birth rates than other similarly wealthy countries, which again invites some kind of explanation, but it's difficult. I think it's fun because this is, you know, in the US, again, people for many years were saying, well, it's not surprising birth rates are down in the US because we don't have paid leave. We don't have publicly supplied, you know, provided childcare. We don't have all these things and then you look and you say, oh, but they have these. These great supportive policies in Scandinavia and guess what their birth rates have fallen and their birth rates are lower than the US. So this is what I mean, there's a lot of patterns in the data that refute obvious explanations. Another one that refutes a lot of, you know, interesting and potentially plausible unicosal explanations again in the US people are saying, well, you know, young people are burdened with student debt, for instance. And then you look and you're like, oh my gosh, the biggest drops have been among women without college degrees. So it can't just be about student debt. So really where we land, and this is joint, my, my, the working paper you refer to as joint work with my long-term, gladrator, Phil Levine, where we land is, and I have to say this is humbling as an economist, it's really not about specific economic costs or specific policies. And you know, what we're calling shifting priorities, I think fits with a lot of these patterns where we see what's happening more in lines of just a broad reordering of adult priorities with parenthood, not just motherhood but parenthood, right. Just playing a diminished role and that doesn't mean these costs and policies don't play into it, but it's all just part of a larger story. How we really came to this was if you look across places and you look across time, there's very little explanatory power in economic context or policies that changed let's say in a given place in a given year and what happened to birth rates right after I think a better way or more appropriate way of thinking about the changes is thinking about it as cohorts. So the young adults who are approaching, they're entering their childbearing years now, why are they making different decisions than those of us who entered our childbearing years 20 years ago or 30 years ago. And when you start thinking about things that have changed across cohorts as opposed to across periods or years, it all starts to make a lot more sense that. People in their 30s today are making different decisions than let's say my cohort, you know, the cohort born in the 70s, then we made in when we were in our 30s. It might be helpful to talk about how thinking on this has changed because sociologists and economists have been puzzling over this for a while. And my understanding is that when it first, well, first of all, I mean, obviously for ages, people in the say the 70s, what people were worried about was population explosion. And this idea that for the birth rates was a problem is a fairly recent recent idea within the academy. But when people first started thinking about what affects fertility decisions, it was quite, I guess, rigidly economical in its view that it was, it must be something to do just with affluence. And of course, the baby boom, particularly in America, the baby boom is this amazing sociological phenomenon that people have sought to explain. You write in this working paper about people thinking of children as inferior goods versus normal goods. Yes. We have a way of with language is the kind of thing. Right. Do you want to explain for sure what that means? Well, again, I actually think, well, there's a couple things. Let's put a pin on the thought about the population bomb and people thinking population growth was a problem because they do want to come back to that. I think it's helpful to sort of bucket, what are the consequences of high fertility or low fertility separate from the cause. But so I do want to come back to that. The other interesting thing about income, which is I think really hard for people to get their heads around is if we think in a very macro sense, certainly it's the case as societies have gotten richer or if you will get richer countries birth rates are lower. Right. And so that sort of contributes to this idea that when when people are richer, they choose to have more kids. But of course, when people are richer, a lot of things are different. So if we think more at a micro level within a given context, if you're in a rich society, if you're in, you know, an advanced economy where women are working, where modern contraception is readily available. Then actually, we do see that kids are normal goods. What do we mean by that? A normal good isn't good. It's terrible to call kids normal goods, but a good in our models is something that when people have more money, when there's like, you know, a shock to income, a positive shock to income or a negative shock to income. Again, in a given broader context, then when people get more money, they have more kids when they lose income, they have fewer kids. And it's really helpful to realize at a macro sense when you're moving from a lower income to a higher income society, everything is changing, not just income, but opportunities for women to work access to contraception, modern healthcare, child mortality declines, maternal mortality declines. In a given society, when people get more income, we see they choose to have more kids, or if you're looking in a specific place, holding housing costs constant and all that, people with more income can afford to have more kids. So it's not just that when people, you know, have more income, they don't want kids, this gets back to the very economical way of thinking about this. So Gary Becker, very famously, brought economics to the study of the families in the 1960s. And of course, you know, I'm trained as a mainstream economist, so these are the models I learned and love, and they make a lot of intuitive sense. Basically, people take their constraints, their budget constraints is given. We only have so much time and money. And then given time and money and prices, you know, we choose how we spend it. And if we want to have kids and we like kids, that takes up time and money that other things, you know, there's a trade off there. So I think that framework is very powerful. The shift, though, is again, that's sort of taking context is given, taking preferences is given. And when we look at the studies we have from the past 20 years that are very statistically rigorous, we're just finding that these incremental changes in prices or income, they can't explain what's happening. They can't explain the widespread, steep, sustained decline in fertility. And so that's why my co-author and I in this paper say we have to step back and actually start to question where are preferences coming from? What are the contexts in which people are making these decisions? And I, you know, again, I think what's happened across cohorts is the whole set of options has really changed. Like what can people choose to spend their adult lives, time and money, resources? What can they spend it on that's sort of socially available, socially acceptable to everyone? It's sort of like all blown open, right? And so I think that's probably more informative when we think about that. It's not just, oh, kids are marginally more expensive than they were three years ago because childcare is more expensive. It's more, I'm a 30 year old and there used to be a really strong norm of what do I do in my 30s, I get married and have kids. That's no longer such a strong norm. Now I can revisit the entire game and I'm looking at what options are available to me and how attractive is it to me to decide I want to spend a lot of time raising children as opposed to, you know, traveling or investing in my career. And all these other things that are really accessible to me. Yeah, it clearly has something to do with norms, doesn't it? There's clearly a degree of social contagion because you see, for instance, if your sister has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby if she doesn't, so clearly people are imitating each other. Even if all that's happened, is it there was one intervention that has led to a vicious cycle of falling fertility? Yeah, it clearly is the case that we're in that cycle now and that when it becomes abnormal to have children. People are less likely to do it. Here's where I think so, as economists, we are really, really good at identifying the effects of these very well identified shocks. So, for example, as you, you know, as you've referred to, we do have evidence that if someone's sister has a baby or if you happen to be in a workplace where you're randomly assigned to a coworker who has more kids, these have effects on people. So, I think that's a nice, a nice proof of concept that peer effects matter, but the aggregate effects are so much larger than they think we're even capable of measuring with these really well designed surveys, because when everyone around you has kids, life is sort of set up that way. Even fewer and fewer people have kids, life is less set up that way, right? Like, just even the way neighborhoods are set up or how easy it is to go to restaurants or use public transportation. I mean, I was talking to someone the other day, you know, she's trying to get her kid in downtown DC across town to child care, before she goes back across town on public transportation to her job. Child care is really hard to find. She's riding the bus with her toddler, which smells of pot, right? And it's not a family-friendly public transportation system, because there's not a lot of kids around. And so, it's really hard to measure the way fewer and fewer kids or in places, conversely, where there's a lot of kids. It just shapes the dynamic of a place that makes having kids or not more or less attractive or more or less costly. I often used to think this when we lived in London and we'd get the bus, either with my elders or my youngest, and the way that London buses are set up is that there's normally only one or two spots for a buggy. And it's the same spot that the wheelchair user has to use, and there's signs up everywhere saying if someone using a wheelchair needs to use this space, anyone using a buggy has to get off the bus. So it's actually a clear prioritisation, which, to be honest, very rarely happens, because there aren't that many people who use a wheelchair as you want to get on the bus. But the thing that happened much more often is that you'd be waiting at the bus, and it would be raining, because it's with London, and then a bus would come along, and there were already the buggy spots were already filled. And the thing that I always noticed with my kind of demography hat on was that there were like, there's typically maybe eight to ten spots specifically for elderly people, and then there's maybe two for the buggy's, and I thought, well, I guess the buses have been designed roughly with the demographics of this country in mind. So interesting, some, often the way I talk, I wind up in this, you know, pitting kids against the elderly, which, you know, I don't mean to, but there is a lot to be that example, you can take that in so many ways, I mean, in the US, if you just look at our public spending at the federal budget, we spend five times per capita on people over age 65, then we do under age 18. It just shows you the priorities of a society, I've been thinking more and more about this in housing, we have a lot of sort of property tax exemptions or preferential taxes for developers who are building housing for 55 and over right or property tax exemptions for the elderly, but it's young people who can afford to buy a house. And, but our policies don't reflect that there's no car about to, oh, if you reserve so many units for people with kids under 18, you get a tax break, we just don't have that, I think it's pretty interesting. It's interesting, you think about the buggy, you know, when I think about my kids or my teenagers in college age now, but when they were little, yes, combining work and child and, you know, having kids was really hard and childcare is really expensive. If I think about the few events that were hardest in my life as someone with like a young kid, one of them was when I had a toddler on plane, and she was throwing a tantrum, and the entire plane was looking at me and the flight attendant was threatening to kick me off, and I think about it all the time, like if this were in the age of post cell phone, I would have been one of those crazy people you'd see on a viral video where I'm losing my mind because my baby won't stop screaming and the flight attendant won't stop yelling at me. And I was like, I was, I mean, I was stressed about that incident, like for like three days, and everyone was looking at me, and I think about that, I'm like, now when I see people with young kids, I try to smile at them or offer help because you're like, that's the difference between a society that welcomes kids or is family friendly versus not. And again, those things are really hard to measure. Yeah, yeah, I think by this all the time, what is it like raising children in a low fertility society? Yeah, exactly. Hard because people, because you just don't have that, not least because a lot of the people on the plane will never have been in that spot. Exactly. That's not just because they're never going to have children, they could yet have children is because they're going to have, they're going to have spent a longer period of that outlive without having had children. Then they would have done in the past because if you have your first and your late birth, you saw something, you just have this great sway at the time where you cannot directly empathize. That's exactly right. I just like, I assumed everyone felt bad for me because I'm like, this is so stressful. If you've ever had kids, you know how stressful this is. And then if he can clearly didn't feel bad for me, they felt bad for the flight attendant. Yeah, I'm not surrounded by parents. Yeah, screaming toddler. Yeah, it's so true. And I think and the weird thing is that it seems to compound. I've never been South Korea, but I hear from people who have in recent years that you'll often see signs up in restaurants saying like no kids allowed in this restaurant. And it's like, as if you had to, yeah, South Korea famously devoid of children, but I guess people when they're not exposed to children, they become less tolerant. And they don't see them as a charming rarity. They see them as an imposition. That's right. So this, this speaks to a lot of the resistance to pushes for, let's say, pro natalist or pro family policy. Um, has this idea of why should I be burdened if someone else chooses to have children that's on them, you know, I choose to go sailing or whatever you choose to go and have kids. Yeah, me, me, me, why should I as a taxpayer pay for that? I think that raises a really important question about what are the benefits to fertility or population growth for society more broadly. Again, to use the cold language of economists, do children have positive spillovers? Is there an externality? Is there a basic economic reason why society should in some sense subsidize parents make life easier for parents, socially share the cost burden of raising the next generation. You know, as an economist, I think the answer to that is a very clear yes. And that's a pretty straightforward argument to make you could also step back from any externality argument and just say from a normative perspective, we think children are good. And from a normative perspective, we want to be a society that invests in families that helps take care of families that doesn't want the burden to just fall on parents. This one of my main areas of scholarship is inequality and poverty. And there there's just a major case to be made for sharing in the burden of raising children because we know from a financial perspective, children who are under resourced or grow up and under resourced homes. There are, again, in the cold-hearted language of economists, they're less productive as adults. They're going to cost society more later. So you basically as a society, get your money back if you ameliorate child poverty, if you invest in early childhood health and education. So that's about sort of the case for targeted spending on kids and helping kids in my mind is really clear. But you could also make a broader case that it's not just about supporting low income families. It's about making society more family-friendly so that we are a society, a population that's growing. This gets back to your earlier point about, is population growth good? And if so, why were we so worried about population growth 50 years ago? This episode is sponsored by Relay, one of those brands that's just such a perfect fit with MMM. I think what they're doing is excellent. Relay is an app that helps people stop using porn. And let's be honest, porn is basically everywhere on the internet. Most men see it first as teenagers. It quietly becomes part of life. But over time, it leaves a mark. Your more distracted, less present, less patient. It eats away at integrity, makes secrecy feel normal and creates distance in your relationships. 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How do you, I think that everyone pretty much is sold on the idea that you should on the poverty point that you should invest money and show important children to make sure they hit better outcomes as adults. The challenge is how do you do that? And similarly, if you're sold on the idea that pronatalism is good, how do you do that? Because as discussed, we don't really know why buffets have fallen. And so trying to work out how to raise them is really tricky. And you do go through this in the paper, like the various interventions that have been tried and how much of an effect they have. It's not nothing, but not that much either, which is not nothing, but not that much. I find, well, I wish more people were sold on the need to invest in, you know, fighting child poverty or investing in children from low and come backgrounds. And maybe people are sold on it until it comes to actually voting for policies that would spend more money on those kids, at least in the US, that's it, you know, our hangout. I actually don't think people are widespread sold on the idea that low fertility is a problem. Every time I've written anything about this, I've been surprised by how much pushback they'll be from, let's say feminist reporters who, I mean, certainly in like the New York Times or the Washington Post write articles with headlines like, you know, stop. It's not women's responsibility to have kids to fund your social security system, like economists need new models, this kind of visceral reaction that essentially making a pronatalist cases anti women. So I think it's worth causing on that because I think that's really, really counterproductive. Certainly I don't think anybody should be trying to convince their coerce women who don't want to have children that they should have them. What I'm saying is we don't really know to what extent fertility is down because people don't want children or because people are choosing not have children given society as it is. So if we made says if we had more of a society a shared societal responsibility for taking care of children, if we made family life easier, would more people choose to have children or feel like they could have afford to have children. And basically then, like, you know, everybody's happier, right? It's good for society to have the dynamic society and population growth and now more people are realizing their intentions. So what's really interesting on this point is if you look at survey data on stated fertility desire or intention or ideals. And I have to caveat that and say, you know, as an economist, I'm obliged to say, you know, we tend to take more from what people are doing them what they're saying. So people, right? But I actually think it's really instructive here to look at what they're saying because what we see in the data is people still sort of say that they think two two children is roughly an ideal. And that's true across high income countries. It's true to people of different ages. So it'd be one thing if you asked, you know, 18 year olds, how many kids do you want to have and they say three and then by the time they're 40, they realize actually that's really hard. I just want one. But actually what we see is across the age distribution, people are saying their desired fertility or their ideal fertility is higher than what they have. It has gone down a bit across cohorts, but not nearly as much as realized fertility. So that to me is actually really interesting and challenging and gives me pause because if what I saw in the survey data was a huge increase in the share of women saying they wanted to remain childless or a huge decrease from two to one or below one in ideal fertility. Then I would say, OK, people have decided they really don't want to be parents or they don't want multiple children. And so what do we do to make sure we still have a lot of economic innovation and dynamic economies in a low fertility world. The fact that we have many more people childless than say want to be childless, the fact that we have lower fertility than people say they'd like to have makes me think that actually if we could relax constraints a bit, if we could change the way we sort of treat families, then you might improve overall welfare because more people can actually realize their ideals. So I think again, this brings me back to the context people are not making decisions and vacuums they're making decisions in context where. You know, they they want to work or they feel like they have to work and that leads them to choose working over parenthood again, I don't want to be flipped because like you said. There's no evidence that oh, if we just made child care more affordable or if we just said more paid leave people would have more kids, so I think it's all it's a whole bunch of things that would have to change for people to make different choices or feel like changing their way the approach basically all of their 30s in terms of marriage and fertility and all of that. I mean, even if it didn't it doesn't actually raise both rates all that much, I still think there's a sort of justice argument for making your parents, your children's lives easier. Yeah, yeah, that's why that's why I think the sort of bristling against anything that sounds pro natalist is really counter productive. This was amazing. We just had this in the U.S. where the Trump administration proposed $1,000 or initially they said or Trump said in some speech $5,000 baby bonuses. I remember and people went nuts, everyone's like, I don't want the Trump baby bonus, whatever you're like, I can't trust you. I want that Trump baby bonus. Right, I was like, get it to me. Trump, like $5,000. Yeah, the time of a birth, like that is that's something that plenty of progressives would have liked, frankly, if it weren't coming from Trump. So it's sort of like, we have to divorce the messenger or even the pro natalist message from, is this a good idea? I think giving resources to families with young children is a good idea for a lot of reasons. Even if it doesn't increase birth rates. Yeah. The other argument you can make to the feminist objection to pro natalism, it's more surprising to most listeners is if feminist societies die out, then feminism dies out. The example I always give is like North and South Korea, where North Korea is like borderline at replacement level and we ever need to trust the numbers coming out of it. But point is North Korea has substantially a higher fertility than South Korea. And eventually that has really serious geopolitical consequences in terms of South Korea's ability to defend itself. And you can kind of, you can map that out, right? You can say, okay, I mean, if societies that just say, no, children are an infringement on women's freedom, we hate this, whatever. Over time, the societies die. They go the way the shakers, right? There's a variant, not even a variant, but a complimentary view, which is if we don't get ahead of this and come up with pro women progressive ways of addressing low fertility, you will have autocratic governments come at this in a way that we really don't like, which is actually let's restrict women's access to reproductive freedom. Or let's restrict women's opportunity to the work. So it's related to the point about which societies thrive. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I actually think on a, in a less drastic way, this tradwife movement is super interesting in terms of what it says about how people are reacting to this. I don't, you know, this is something I leave to the cultural anthropologist to study, I'm intrigued by it in two ways, and I don't know what to make of it. On the one hand, I can see it as a reaction to. Again, if you think about this as a cohort perspective, you look at young women today and they see their mom's generation actually was the generation that tried to do both tried to work and have kids and it was really freaking hard. And they're like, that doesn't look very fun. I'm going to go back to just doubling down and being really good at being a homemaker and a mom, right? I can totally see that. I also another view of this is sort of closer to the undesirable vision, which is, okay, there's a whole bunch of men who don't like what's happening in low fertility. We knew feminism was going to bring a problem. We have to push this tradwife narrative and get women back into the home. When I see some of that tradwife stuff, it makes me super nervous for young women because that is a very, very vulnerable financial position. I would never want my daughters or any young women to be completely financially dependent on a husband, on a man. I mean, one thing that's very, very different now than in the 1950s is the marriage contract is not a very strong contract. That's not just about the norms. That is a legal institutional statement. It is very easy for someone to get married for then a woman to specialize in home care, essentially not develop her marketable skills and then be left economically vulnerable. And so I actually, that movement makes me very nervous on behalf of young women. And so that's another reason my feminist, I feel like, you know, actually thinking about ways to make, again, really again, thinking about people who have a latent desire to be parents. How do we make parenthood more compatible with modern life so more people choose it? In the context of a society that many of us value, one where women are active and engaged outside the home, if that's what they want to be doing. I think the good news from the feminist perspective is that I don't think that falling birth rates actually have much of anything to do with feminism. Because if they did, you wouldn't expect a round to have such low birth rates. Right. There are so many counter examples to the idea that because you hear this from the right as well, the idea, I mean, you've already raised it and the idea of the autocratic government wanting to suppress women's freedom. Do you have people saying exactly this? And they say, well, okay, I mean, if that were the case, then you would expect to see at least some correlation between different countries who have different approaches to see you don't like. No. And you also basically see no correlation across countries with two things that are surprising. This surprised me when I saw it in the data. Now, if you look across countries at the share of women who work outside the home and the birth rates, there's essentially no correlation. Why? Because in high income countries, basically 80 to 85% of women work outside the home. But that you should think of now is the default women are working outside the home. And then they're choosing to have kids or not. Right. So, so this is different again, like to get back to this is different than the way economists had traditionally modeled this. It's also different than what the data said in the 1980s when you look to cross places and places with high female labor force participation rates had lower fertility rates. Again, that's just no longer true and sort of reversed. And now it's basically, you know, correlation is zero. The other thing that this really surprised me, we just did this for the working paper again, your reference. We looked across countries at the documented decline in earnings among women among mothers right after they have a child. So in some places, women's earnings go down by more. We don't know if that's because, and I'm saying this collectively, it's often not described this way, but collectively, we can't tell how much that reflects constraints that in a given place, it's just harder to combine work and having kids or it's women choosing, they'd rather stay home with their kids. Okay. But in any case, if you look across places that drop in earnings among women, no relationship to fertility. So again, like this speaks, this, this bolsters your point is that it's not that in places where women go to work or in places where women, like, can maintain their earnings or not, that that's what's driving birth rates. Basically, birth rates are falling everywhere. Right. Another just so story that you hear quite often in relation to this is that it's to do with somewhere like South Korea has this particular problem where women are participating in the lead market at high rates. But men haven't caught up to the idea that you should have 50, 50 distribution to domestic labor. And it's like, I wish it was true. I mean, so often like there's so many, there are so many political hobby horses that you could potentially attach to this question. And everyone gets it to go. And there's at least a dozen different options in circulation, but they just don't work. None of them really work. I agree. There's a lot of things I want to be, I want to be true. I want it to be true that if like child care or more readily affordable or maternity leave was passed, there'd be higher birth rates. We don't see that right. And it will marriage rights. Japan will maybe high marriage rights and we do know about rights. Yeah. And I want it to be true that in places where there's more egalitarian gender roles in the house and men do more, we see birth rates haven't fallen, but that's not really true anywhere. South Korea and Israel are sort of stand out exceptions and all of this. So if you run the numbers and use those two countries, things look like they're driven by certain things. But then when you take out South Korea, Israel, which are really exceptions, there's just not these strong patterns. I mean, another thing that's really hard here is again, like at a very micro level, I'm sure it's true that like, you know, having a spouse who's more helpful at home might lead you to have more kids. Better doing more than they've ever done in terms of if you look at time. Right. So young dads now are doing lot more than their dads did. Including like up a middle class, high status kind of dads who now walk around with babies and slings and stuff, which was not true for say my dad's generation. Right. And it increasing. I wrote a piece of expectation about this years ago, actually being a re-hands on dad is a status symbol. It's a sign of being elite. And that's still not affecting bathrooms. Yeah. Now one trend that I think is like, it's potentially interesting. This relates to what you were just we're saying. The decline in birth rates and the decline in marriage has been lower in the US. The decline is smaller among college educated couples. So that's actually super interesting. I don't know the extent to which this is true, but I wonder how much is that because college educated couples have better worked out. How to manage sort of newer expectations and shared household childcare responsibilities than non college educated couples. I mean, I don't even know the answer to that question. Is it because they've started from a lower starting point now that their birth rates already fell a while ago. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Right. They're they had lower to fall. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. Totally. Where I say the fall among. I mean, it does seem pretty likely, but the fall among teenage mothers. It's so much less common. You've written about this. Of course, it's awesome. Teenage girls to have children now is because of the long acting with us, but contraceptives. That seems that seems really likely to me. You tell me they'd agree with that. Yeah. And you can't explain that much. The decline in teen birth rates really has it's been stunning. It's over 80% since the mid 90s. Yeah. I think that more reflects to teenagers credit. You know, it happened at the same time that a lot of girls were just sort of more. You just see an increase in the share of girls going to college. A lot happened. And if you just look across places, again, on a micro level, expanded access to long acting reversible contraceptives leads to a smaller leads to a reduction in teen bursts. But aggregate wise, it can explain a large share of the aggregate decline. Again, it's just happened in a really widespread sustained way since the the mid 1990s. And so it's a lot more response in a timing sense to a decline in all sorts of teenage risky behavior and also juvenile crime. I spent a lot of time early in my career trying to explain my teen birth rates were so high. Now it's like we they've come crashing down, which is great. I actually. I'm more of the view now that we don't really understand why so many teenage risky behaviors sort of peaked in the 90s. This is not the end of the episode actually only halfway through, but the rest of the show is behind a paywall in the extended version. Melissa and I spoke about my personal theory as to why birth rates are falling all over the world. The gap between what people say they want in terms of fertility and what they actually do. And why so many people take a very short term view of their own reproductive lives while you can of course listen to MMM or ever you get your podcasts. 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