Guess Who Isn't Having Babies

My friend Matt Ridley today pointed out an interesting demographic fact, and as it happens a fact that Charlie Kirk commented on just weeks before his death: the decline in birth rates seems to be concentrated primarily among progressives, while self-described conservatives have seen a much less significant decline.

We can speculate on why that should be, and obvious explanations appear to present themselves, but this is a fact.

Even so, conservatives’ birth rates still amount to a decline, and we’re going to need something more than just falling more slowly if we’re going to escape the demographic crisis we face. Men’s Devotional... Bailey, Jamie Best Price: $7.90 Buy New $12.80 (as of 06:41 UTC - Details)

Kevin Dolan runs a natal conference in Austin, Texas, every year, and it’s urgently necessary that you hear him out.

As he opened one of his conferences, he gave the examples of Japan and South Korea, which show us “what may be the best-case scenario, what it might look like if you could let the air out of the balloon slowly. What that looks like is young people chained to the desk, working ever longer hours for ever lower wages, not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family. The countryside and smaller cities abandoned as the tax base evaporates.”

With meticulous planning, Kevin says, those countries can arrange an “orderly tragedy,” and that’s the best case. “But I think Japan and Korea are beautiful places,” he says, “with beautiful people who should go on existing.” Hence his conferences, trying to figure these questions out.

“Places like China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand and Mexico,” Kevin adds, “got old before they got rich. In coming decades, these countries will be totally unable to sustain their elderly populations, even if they could stop the flight of their most productive young people, even if they worked them and taxed them to death.

“Unless something truly dramatic happens, these countries will face humanitarian and political crises on par with the worst of the 20th century.”

What about the U.S.?

We will, says Kevin, probably “be somewhere in the middle. So far, immigration makes US fertility rates look better on paper, but not enough to prevent a de-growth economic collapse and not enough to take care of an aging population. It’s not obvious, in any case, why young immigrant families from poor countries would sign up to support a population of elderly dependents to whom they have no attachment, while their own grandmothers back home are starving.”

“The reason I’m here,” he goes on, “is that I have two girls and four boys. And like a lot of millennials raising kids, when I look around at how few of us manage to start families and how much worse it is for Gen Z, I feel like I caught the last train out. A consistent 95 percent of Americans say they want kids, but it looks like only about 60 percent of millennials will get there.”

Now why are childless people childless? It turns out that being childless is a conscious decision in only 10 percent of cases, with fertility issues accounting for another 10 percent. For the other 80 percent, Kevin explains, it’s “what demographer Stephen Shaw calls unplanned childlessness…. The infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated, employed, paired off and raising kids has just broken down.”

And this section I need you to read in its entirety:

I view this as fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding, we wouldn’t say, “Wow, I’m so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health!” Or, “They’re spoiled; they’re just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors.” And we certainly wouldn’t say, “Good, there are too many Bengal tigers! Bengal tigers are ruining everything.”

Instead, we’d look at their environment and try to figure out what changed, what’s disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative.

And it is a basic imperative. If you’re built to do anything at all, you’re built to fall in love and have children and raise them. And there’s no more punishing verdict, there’s no situation in which a person is more psychologically vulnerable, than when they take a chance on that. You can tell a kid who’s afraid of rejection that it’s not life and death, but it is life and death.

When you ask someone to love you, to marry you, to have a child with you, you’re asking them: do you want my eyes, my nose, my hairline, the way I think, the way I walk and talk? Do you want that to go on into the future or should it go away forever? And for hundreds of millions of men and women, it feels like the whole world is telling them, nope, not you.

For men, it’s usually near the top of the funnel, just getting swiped left 10,000 times at a glance. For women, it often comes later in the form of situationships that can last for months or years and never quite come around to yes, I want you in particular. I want my kids to be like you. I think your thing should go on….

I get why so many people are angry. We’re just not built to be hurt like that over and over again, with no end in sight. And a system where that’s the fate of an ordinary person is a broken system.

Bottom line for me is I don’t want any of that for my kids. I have to think of something better. Yes, there are political and economic dimensions to this issue…. But I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare.

I want my kids to have kids so they can learn that Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than it was as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters, and to care intensely about what happens to them, and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex.

I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who’s just the best and realized that all of that was completely okay and not a big deal, and it didn’t make them unlovable.

You’re supposed to observe your life again in the third person. You’re supposed to see yourself as a little child through your father’s eyes, your mother’s eyes, maybe through God’s eyes. You’re supposed to see yourself saying and doing things your parents said and did. And you’re either supposed to understand that and forgive it, or you’re supposed to recognize that it was wrong and make it right. Maybe both.

And these are psychological loops that don’t close in any other way. Of course, life isn’t fair. Things don’t always work out. But it should be normal, it should be typical to have these experiences. Parenting is as fundamental to the human life cycle as puberty, and just as transformative.

I believe that the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated, employed, married and supporting a family are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life.

Elon Musk retweeted Kevin’s full address with the comment, “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.”

I get that there are challenges involved with having kids — especially when you’re a dissident like you and me, and you feel like the major institutions of society (the schools, for example, but not just them) are systematically trying to undermine you and your parenting.

I recently led a parenting call for my School of Life community, and we came up with a bunch of topics that would make for good sessions in the future: Daily Prayers for Men:... Barsanti, Chris Best Price: $1.99 Buy New $5.19 (as of 10:16 UTC - Details)

–kids and electronics/screens
–discipline
–your kids’ peers
–homeschooling and traditional school
–sleeping issues among young children
–developing a mission statement and statement of values for your family (this was a brilliant idea from one of our members)
–teaching kids about money

and other ideas as well.

We’d all benefit from exchanging ideas with other parents, but good luck doing that nowadays: half the people in any group you’d find are certifiably insane, and they’ll probably think you’re crazy.

In my community nobody has to worry about any of that. We share the same worldview, and we’re normal.

Oh, and another marriage has come out of our community: the soon-to-be bride and groom met inside the School of Life and are getting married next month.

I can sit here and wring my hands in my email newsletter about the challenges we face, or you and I together can try to do something.

I choose the second one:

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