Catherine Pakaluk on *Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth*

Catherine Pakaluk is an Associate Professor of Social Research and Economic Thought at the Bush School of Business at the Catholic University of America. Catherine is also the author of a new book titled, *Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth,* and she joins David on Macro Musings to talk about it. Catherine and David also specifically discuss the facts of demographic decline, the women who are pushing back against this trend, its broader implications for the economy and society, and more.

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Read the full episode transcript:

Note: While transcripts are lightly edited, they are not rigorously proofed for accuracy. If you notice an error, please reach out to [email protected].

David Beckworth: Catherine, welcome to the show.

Catherine Pakaluk: It's great to be here. Thanks, David.

Beckworth: It's great to have you on, and you are covering an amazing topic in this book, and we'll get into it. But before we do that, there's a connection that we have. My colleague here at the Mercatus Center, Pat Horan, is a family member of yours, correct?

Pakaluk: Yes, Pat is the proud husband of my sister, Mary, and that's been delightful.

Beckworth: Yes. Now, I had gotten your book. It was recommended to me. I was reading it, and I did not know that the two of you were related through family. Finally, I made this connection, and I was like, "Wow. Okay, we got to get her in on this show.”

Pakaluk: That's super great.

Beckworth: Yes, I know, so, small world. Also, just something worth noting for listeners out there— We'll provide a link to the book. Catherine, you went viral because of your research that went into this book. You went viral with Macron, the former president of France. Tell us what he said, how you responded, and why it made you famous.

Pakaluk: Yes. That is a great story. So, this is about five years ago now, and he was at the United Nations, and he has a habit. Apparently— he'd said this before— but he's going on about how to raise the standard of living in Africa. He said, "Look, we've got to invest in girls' education, because if we really get girls really well-educated, they won't go on to have seven, eight, or nine children." And in this sort of French fashion, he used a lot of flair, and he said, "Show me anybody or show me any woman who's perfectly well-educated who still has all of those children."

Pakaluk: And I thought that was pretty obnoxious for a lot of reasons, but part of the implication, of course, is that having all of those kids is going to be a problem for the standard of living in Africa, and, also, this determinism about education and children. And so, I was already working on this project, and I thought that this would be a nice opportunity to draw some attention to the project. Of course, I had about three Twitter followers at the time, so I tweeted something in response, "Hey, I'll send you a copy of this research when I'm finished." Then, I added a follow-up with a photo of me on my graduation day with a bunch of my kids. Then, I woke up the next morning, and tens of thousands of other women had followed on and had also attached photos of their graduation regalia and their children. I certainly didn't intend or hope to start a Twitter storm, but that's what happened.

Beckworth: That's an amazing story, and you have eight children. You're a PhD from Harvard, Associate Professor of Economics at a great university, and that is the angle of your book here, right? Tell us a summary of the book, then we'll jump into the details of it.

*Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth*

Pakaluk: Yes, so, I think that it would be worth mentioning that, as an economist, to study labor market and applied micro questions, you're going to be looking at demographic things. I spent a lot of time looking at Becker's material, and meanwhile, you're looking at these demographic trends. On the other hand, in my personal life, I chose to have a lot of kids, and large families find each other. I knew there were a lot of other people that had chosen to have a lot of kids.

Pakaluk: And over the years, thinking about these two sides of my experience, on the professional side, we know what these trends look like. Then, digging into the economics of this, as an economist and somebody interested in how we track demographic and, certainly, these macro level variables, you always have this piece [that] says that the average isn't the whole story. The average isn't the whole story. And so, we think about Hayek's Nobel lecture, and we think about this tendency to summarize all of society in these macro variables.

Pakaluk: So, I thought, okay, you know what, actually, this isn't the whole story. Declining birth rates isn't the whole story. There are clearly these pockets and minorities, and maybe we can learn something by studying, we'll say, the statistical outliers. That was sort of the initial hunch was, are there things we can learn? Because then, you have to ask the question, is this free fall in birth rates, is it deterministic? Is it the sort of thing that we cannot avoid? Related to that, of course, policymakers all over the world are asking what they can do to turn this around. And so, I just had the hunch that maybe we could learn something from talking to the people involved in the statistical outliers, which is a departure from this standard, “let's just summarize everything with one number.”

Beckworth: Yes, so, you talked to 55 women who have five or more children. So, they're defying this trend that you call the birth dearth, which I understand comes from another scholar who was contesting the people in the '60s and '70s calling for a reduction in population.

Pakaluk: Right. That's right. So, I thought, okay, there's about, five— depending on where you draw the line, how many children— 5% to 10% of women are really doing something quite different from the 1.6 total [inaudible]. So, I thought, let's go around and talk to them and figure out why they're doing it. What are the matters of motive, and can we learn anything? If they're just crazy people living in the sticks, [it’s] probably not that relevant for policymakers. But if we find out that there's something interesting going on in terms of human agency, human action, then maybe there's a lesson. That was the thought.

Beckworth: Yes, and so, you have some amazing stories. You talk to these women, you tell the stories, but you also tell the bigger picture of the demographic decline tied all together and end up with some recommendations. So, we want to work through all of that, and just out of the gate, I like to say that there are two big issues that we come back to on the show that I think are very consequential to the US and, in the case of demographics, the world, but housing and population growth. Those are the things that I think that we need to contend with. So, I'm glad to have you on here, and yes, we do spend a lot of time on business cycle issues on this show, but it's always good to go back to the long run economic growth, the other part of macro, [and] focus on the important points. 

Beckworth: So, your book, again, it's about this demographic decline. I went and looked up some other books that have been written on it, and there's a lot out there right now. And just to whet our appetite, I just went on to Amazon. I found one title, No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children. Another one [is], Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline. Another one [is], The Age of Decay: How Aging and Shrinking Populations Could Usher in the Decline of Civilization. Very sobering titles, and you probably know some of these books, some of these authors, and the Wall Street Journal recently had an article [titled], *Why Americans Aren't Having Babies,* recently. So, there are lots of articles and books coming out. Yours presents a unique angle on it. But tell us, should we be concerned? Are these books telling us a story that we should be thinking about?

Pakaluk: Yes, I think we should definitely be thinking about it. I want to draw a line between thinking about it, concern, and alarmism. So, I think that there's been a long line of alarmists related to population. Of course, maybe Paul Ehrlich is the one that we think about most recently. It’s not that recent anymore, but he's still— I want to say that the ghost of Paul Ehrlich, he's still alive and kicking.

Beckworth: He was on 60 Minutes last year.

Pakaluk: Yes, and he's still saying that he was right. He says, "Well, my predictions were wrong, but I was fundamentally right." So, figure that one out. I definitely don't think that we should be alarmist, or population alarmist, but I think that, given that everybody's very concerned about this, and for good reasons largely, why? Because our economies and our political economies will not look the same as we move into several decades of shrinking population. So, we should be concerned about it as intelligent citizens. We should be concerned about it, probably not alarmist, but it's definitely worth being educated about.

Beckworth: That's interesting. We went from maybe one extreme, too many people in the world in the '60s and '70s, to, now, the other extreme. We've got to be careful that we don't swing to extremes. Keep it in a moderate but informed and thoughtful place. So, maybe walk us through the facts of the decline. Where are we now? Where are our fertility rates? What's happening?

The Facts of Demographic Decline

Pakaluk: Okay, well, the latest numbers, just to set the stage from the CDC out, the estimates for 2023 put the total fertility rate of the United States at about 1.63, 1.64. So, that's the total estimated births that a typical woman, a couple will have in their lifetime. And so, we need about 2.1 or 2.05 for replacement. That's substantially below replacement for the United States. Now, that isn't a brand-new number. That is the culmination of a decades-long decrease in the total fertility rate. The CDC likes to tell us that the United States numbers have been, really, generally below replacement since the 1970s and consistently below replacement since the Great Recession.

Beckworth: Wow. Okay, very sobering. This is something happening elsewhere in the world, too, correct?

Pakaluk: Elsewhere, yes. So, we'll call it convergence, this idea that the birth rates around the country, the global birth rates around the country, are converging to similar numbers. And we see convergence in all kinds of macro-level patterns. Growth rates converge in different ways, hopefully going up, converging going upwards. But yes, global convergence is the story of birth rates around the world. To give an example of this idea of convergence, I like to use the United States and Mexico. In Mexico, around the time that I was born in the 1970s, the typical women— so, the total fertility rate, expected lifetime births— was around seven or eight. Now, the last time that the United States had a total fertility rate of seven or eight was around the year 1800.

Beckworth: A long time ago.

Pakaluk: Yes. So, today, Mexico's total fertility rate looks pretty similar to ours, just maybe a nudge above ours, but certainly below replacement. So, what we mean by convergence is to imagine this picture. Mexico went to below replacement numbers or converged to our total fertility rates in the space of my lifetime, so less than 50 years, and it took the United States 200 years to do that same decrease in birth rates. So, that's what I mean by convergence.

Pakaluk: What we mean is not just that all of the countries around the globe are heading in the same direction, but that countries that seem to be behind the curve in terms of economic growth and development, they're catching up. They're catching up to low birth rates. They're getting there faster than we did or the more advanced economies did. And so, that's really the picture around the world. You really have to scour the planet to find countries with above replacement fertility rates today.

Beckworth: Some countries actually are experiencing decline, like China, is that correct?

Pakaluk: Yes. The official numbers say that China started experiencing decline, I think, in 2022, and so is reported in 2023.

Beckworth: That's remarkable.

Pakaluk: It is remarkable.

Beckworth: Absolute decline. I guess Japan is another example.

Pakaluk: Yes. That's right. Japan, I think, just before or right around the same time as the Great Recession, so, over a decade.

Beckworth: Yes. I had a previous guest on the show, and he used the example— Since I live in Nashville part of the time, he said, "David, effectively, a Nashville is being taken away every year from Japan.” So, that's pretty stark.

Pakaluk: Yes. These are stark numbers, and lots and lots of other countries are already in the mode of shrinking or on the verge of shrinking, across Western Europe, for instance.

Beckworth: So, it's kind of tough for us to hope and rely upon immigration as a solution to our declining population because the other countries, too, are declining, correct?

Pakaluk: That's right. I think that Elon Musk made this point recently, maybe in the last year, at maybe a demographic conference in Italy, and he said, "Look, we're all going to be looking for the same immigrants to come." So, right. I think, when I was a kid, even though, I think, native birth rates were already in a close to perilous place, we did have such a high amount of immigration in this country that I think people weren't too worried. We talked about American exceptionalism in birth rates, which I think was probably unfounded. But we had a healthy amount of immigration at that time. I think that if you map this out, more or less, all countries will be looking to import the same amount of labor or similar amounts of labor, and we will be competing for immigrants, in a sense.

Beckworth: Now, I heard you on another podcast when you were discussing this book, [and you] mentioned one of the implications, which I want to get into now, of this decline. But it's tough to even rely on immigration if our population is going down, because we become more reluctant to embrace immigrants.

The Implications of Demographic Decline

Pakaluk: Yes, this is a tricky argument to make, but I think that once you get it out of your mouth, it makes a little bit of sense, which is that, in a climate of declining native population, people feel a little bit existentially threatened— their way of life, their culture— as birth rates go down. Oftentimes, they can't even name what it is, but they feel like, we or who we are, is becoming-- we're becoming less robust. In that climate, you worry about your way of life.

Pakaluk: It's easy to see how a xenophobic or anti-immigration attitude can rise, and It's probably one way to explain some of the political frenzy that we have today about immigration. We obviously need— and immigration is a good thing for a country. We need healthy immigration, orderly and legal, I would say, but we need certainly healthy amounts of immigration. It doesn't make an awful lot of sense, when you have rapidly declining birth rates, to be hostile to people coming to want to live and work here. Yet, that fear of, maybe, our way of life slipping away seems to possibly increase people's reluctance to let people in.

Beckworth: Yes, that was such a lightbulb moment for me, when I heard you bring this point up, because I had been relying on a story that the Great Recession, the weak growth, kind of fueled this populism, but it's more than that. It's the decline in the numbers of the population itself.

Pakaluk: I think so, yes.

Beckworth: Yes, so, it's a very rich story there. Well, that's a consequence for immigration policy. What about other areas like economic growth? What does the declining population mean for that?

Pakaluk: Well, it certainly would suggest something like secular stagnation. It would certainly suggest a slowing down. You can't really pick through the best growth models we have and remove L. So, we want to take the labor force out of economic growth. You could probably get growth for a while by looking at increasing technology and increasing levels of innovation, and if you make each worker more productive, so you look at per capita productivity, we could hope for that.

Pakaluk: Now, in fact, if we look at productivity, we don't see that those numbers are rapidly increasing. So, we might need to investigate that a little bit. But certainly, it seems to expect something fantastical to think that we could chart forward healthy 2% or 3% growth with a shrinking population. We would need to expect a lot from our AI or our new innovative technologies. So, I think that a realistic guess would be to think about a slightly slowing and slowing type of economic growth.

Beckworth: So, we shouldn't be too hopeful that AI will be our savior in this moment.

Pakaluk: Well, I think that the best estimates are mild or modest.

Beckworth: Well, something I think about is like endogenous growth theory, Paul Romer, Chad Jones, which would actually say that we need more people, at least on the supply side, because more people means more ideas and, ultimately, ideas— and it's not robots that have the ideas, it's the people. So, maybe you have a stock of robots, but to continue to have growth, you have got to have innovation from the population and ideas.

Pakaluk: Right, and I think that that model is compelling. I think it's true. And the idea that you could just have this shrinking population and expect that that shrinking population will constantly become ever more productive without people to produce the ideas— it doesn't make a lot of sense. I think there are limits to the idea that we could— that the robots will make us more productive, but [we] certainly need a little bit of population growth.

Beckworth: Were the robots to be able to think independently, [then] I might have other concerns.

Pakaluk: We certainly might.

Beckworth: Right. So, there'd be other issues to deal with. But the economic growth— I think it's a big deal, declining living standards, and I do think that this endogenous growth theory approach is very useful. Alex Tabarrok once put it this way: "Do you view people as stomachs or as brains?" And a lot of the de-growthers, the Paul Ehrlichs— they tend to view people less as just a consumer, but Julian Simon, which you mentioned in your book— ideas, the greatest resource is our brain.

Pakaluk: Right. I think that there's two pieces of that. One is that people produce ideas, [and] that that's really the only way it's ever worked, and [it’s] the only way we can imagine it working in the future. But the other piece of Julian Simon's argument, too, is that human beings have this rational capacity to navigate the circumstances around us, to think about the climate, to think about our impact on the environment, to think about resource challenges. And so, in fact, every time we look at periods of history where there's maybe stress from population and resources, human beings have had this marvelous capacity to navigate that and negotiate it in a way that really suggests that— they say that the overpopulation alarmism didn't make a lot of sense. So, I don't see any reason to think that we will not perform similarly in the future. In other words, more people is good, both for those innovation reasons, more ideas, but also because it's human beings who have this rational capacity to navigate the challenges of our circumstances.

Beckworth: That's a great point. If you look at the possibility that humans can solve the problem, and then we have innovation, we have ideas, [then] that's, I think, a better route. Another angle on this— So, there's supply side ideas. People innovate. But like Adam Smith said, the extent of the market drives innovation, too. So, on the demand side, if you've got a lot of people and you're just innovating to meet demand as more people come to you— So, both the demand and supply sides suggest that more people are useful and important.

Pakaluk: Right, absolutely. I keep trying to describe for people that, well, it will be hard to imagine— in the future, with declining populations, it will be hard to imagine, in small towns, that you could have three or four different fast-food chains. So, maybe that's a good thing if you're against fast-food chains. But it's this extent of the market thing. We're quite accustomed to being able to choose between Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks, and for a lot of people, it was a good thing, eventually, not to have only one choice, but to have two choices. But we'll have to see some of that differentiation in the market, I would think, work its way backwards.

Beckworth: Yes, I hadn't thought of it on the retail food side.

Pakaluk: Maybe that's not the best choice.

Beckworth: But it's a good example, or how many dentists are in your town?

Pakaluk: Correct, yes.

Beckworth: Maybe you don't want to go to one dentist or go to the other provider.

Pakaluk: Yes, correct.

Beckworth: So, it definitely has a bearing. So you've got [the] supply side, [the] demand side, and then one other thought that I would just add to that is, also, just that the whole agglomeration economy is like in cities, right? There are spillovers. So, maybe this goes back to the first point, that when you are trying to innovate, if you're around other people who share your interests and skills, then you can innovate more effectively.

Pakaluk: Yes, I think that there are reasons to be concerned on all of those fronts. Again, probably not alarmist, but we will have to adjust to things looking different.

Beckworth: Yes, so, we've touched on immigration, the economy. But could there also be political and social unrest from this?

Pakaluk: Yes, I think so. I think that, related to this point about maybe people feeling threatened, I certainly think that's got to be a piece of this. We've watched now, what, 10, 12 years of surprising levels of political unrest, things like Brexit and ongoing questions in Europe of what that looks like. But I just think that people become less peaceful when they feel that things are under threat, and It's a funny thing. It's like, how can you be under threat from something that's not an explicit threat, right? It's not someone waging war, but there's this sense, deep down, that maybe— So, I do think that declining populations may lend themselves to more political unrest.

Beckworth: Two other things, one from your book. You talked about this “chain of infinity”, or Hannah did in your book, and I think just the meaning of life. If there's fewer people, if you're not having children, if you're not this chain of relationships— Maybe talk about that chain of infinity idea.

Breaking Down the “Chain of Infinity”

Pakaluk: Yes, so I sometimes say that they're about, as far as I could see, three different types of things that are related to falling birth rates. One is economics, we've talked about that. The second is political. The third is sort of human. But actually, I almost think about them in reverse order. I wonder if the human part is the most important reason to be a little bit sad or a little bit concerned about this, and the way I think about it is, for a given population, let's pick a number. If you fix the population size, you could think of two societies with the same population size. One that has tiny families, one child per household, and one that has maybe two or three. The population with the smaller households and the smaller families, looking forward, that's fewer brothers and sisters. It's fewer aunts and uncles. It's fewer cousins.

Pakaluk: And I remember, when I was a kid, people talking about [how] in Japan, nobody has a cousin. There were these sorts of things. So, in my book, one of the subjects talked about how she had rediscovered her Judaism in Israel and had come to think about the generations and had come to think about how, as a Jewish woman, having children meant that she and her children could participate in this chain of generations, going back to Moses and to Adam.

Pakaluk: She found that incredibly meaningful, and it was part of what made the sacrifices of her life sensible to her. And I thought, well, that's a really interesting idea. How many people that I know talk about having children as this way to connect themselves to all of these past generations? And I think that's just one way of capturing it, that the more abundant our families [are], the more connected we are to other people. We talk about fraternity and solidarity in society as being this idea [where] you look around and you are able to see other people as like your brother. What better practice is there for seeing other people like your brother, than to have a brother? You have to have a brother to know what it means to treat some other person as a brother. So, I think that that's the thing that— I don't think it has an easy fix, but I think it's worth contemplating.

Beckworth: When you think of towns that have lost people and there aren't many children in the towns, there aren't leagues, [and] if you go to churches where there's just a bunch of old people there, you're losing something, the spirit. And I think that's a huge part of human existence that we may not appreciate. Related to that— I see this in Japan and maybe at some point in the US— there's this intergenerational tension. We have to take care of this growing group of old people, and we have to work harder, longer hours, and our standard of living isn't as great, we have smaller homes. So, there are a lot of issues here, a lot of consequences to this issue. Maybe we should go back, though, and maybe ask this question. How did we get here? Why has there been this decline? What are the forces driving it?

The Forces Driving Demographic Decline

Pakaluk: Yes, I think it's not terribly mysterious, but maybe that's me being an economist and simplifying it a little bit. I'd like to say that I think it starts in the 1800s, 19th century. We talked about the convergence of birth rates and this earlier decline. So, the United States was already experiencing a pretty steady decline in birth rates, at the household level, going all the way back. Why does that occur? It really occurs with economic growth, which means that, in some way, this is an expression of success and prosperity.

Pakaluk: And so, what does that look like? I think it means that households are the locus of this decision. And, of course, that's something that I really focus on in the book, is how households are the locus of the decision making. It really is a micro variable. We can't do birth rates by command or by fiat as much as we would like to, and we could maybe get into that later. This is definitely a demand question. Why and when does a household demand children? We can use that language in this podcast.

Pakaluk: So, I think it's fairly simple. I think that, as households become wealthier, we don't need children to do as much. And so, it's hard to think, today, that there was a time when every household would have had multiple animals to take care of, and those animals would have been important, not just for livelihood, maybe on the farm, but for transportation. And actually taking care of animals— I have two dogs and that is already a thing, but if you had horses and goats and chickens, more hands around the house are definitely valuable. And so, okay, that's a demand which starts to diminish as we get wealthier.

Pakaluk: So, [with] children, we could think of as children as labor, but it's like help around the house. Just think about the household production unit. Children are, really, super valuable, or, you know, you need to send someone out to the well. You don't have running water. How many times do you want to go to the well? So, you just think, look, in these sorts of situations, more hands are great. You also have this concern that as many children didn't live to age five as they do now. So, if you thought that you would like to have some hands-on-deck in the household, [then] you need to overshoot that number, and plenty of people talk about that.

Pakaluk: Then, finally, I would say that, in those ages, people weren't able to accumulate and save as much. And so, the general thought was that if you wanted to be provided for after you could no longer work, [then] you'd have to have more than one or two kids to take care of you in your old age. And again, we don't think about that at all today. We don't think, gosh, I better be sure to check the box, have three or four kids so that somebody takes care of me. Why? Because of household savings on the one hand, and then public pensions on the other hand have generally solved that household problem.

Pakaluk: But what it means to solve that household problem of who takes care of the elderly, or who takes care of us when we can't work anymore, is actually to decrease the need for children, or the demand, like the demand side. So, basically, children aren't needed, when they're young, to add labor to the household, for the household to flourish as much. Then, they're not needed to take care of you in your older age, and these are products of prosperity and growth. So, basically, increase the prosperity and you decrease that demand for the children, let's say labor, and then old age care.

Pakaluk: Heading into the 20th century, how does that picture change? There's really one big thing that you'd have to draw attention to, and lots of economists have looked at this. Notably, Claudia Goldin just won the Nobel Prize, and Larry Katz. But basically, we had this contraceptive revolution in the middle part of the 20th century, [and] really, the inflection point is right around 1960. And what this does is it, what we'll say, liberalizes the educational pathways for women, and that's the major inflection point that you start to see, [is] women, mothers in fact, moving into the labor force in really large numbers. And if you look at women's labor force participation over the course of the 20th century, we can see that the introduction of really efficient, effective, and reversible birth control, with the pill, is this major transformation [in] women's labor force participation and moving into higher education. 

Pakaluk: So, what this really does in terms of the demand for children is that it really increases the cost of children in the opportunity cost sense. So, now, the hit to the household to have a child isn't just the pregnancy and the sleepless nights and those sorts of things, and maybe the marginal cost of food or whatever that is. Now, the cost is foregone income to the household, and then, of course, in a deeper sense, foregone identity. Women would like to develop their potential. Maybe all of their peers are going to school, having a career. So, to drop out of that is a much bigger cost.

Pakaluk: So, basically, I guess, now to sum up, you have the demand for children, for the household flourishing, decreasing because of these various types of economic growth. You have a really big hit to the opportunity cost of having children. And so, ceteris paribus, without any big increase to the demand for children coming from some other place, we really would just see a decrease in birth rates. I think it's pretty straightforward.

Beckworth: I like your explanation, [that] both demand and supply are important there, so, Econ 101 telling a story. So, economic growth, again, it's progress. We should be happy that we don't need to have as many kids just to survive.

Pakaluk: That's right.

Beckworth: Also, the pill revolutionized how we live.

Pakaluk: Women's labor market, yes.

Beckworth: I was looking at the trends for fertility, like you mentioned, [in the] 1800s, it was seven, eight. Now it's down below two. And what was interesting— and in all of these stories that you're telling, you can see it in the trends and changes. But what you also see is the baby boom, which was interesting. It's declining and declining, and [then] boom, it spikes up. Then, it comes down, and it comes down, I'm guessing, because of the pill. But I was wondering, to what extent does it come down because of the Great Society and the transfer programs? Were they that consequential in the story?

Pakaluk: That's a great question. I don't think that we have good causal evidence about this. I think we do have pretty good causal evidence that the pill impacts both non-marital and marital fertility. We've got a couple waves of research on that, and it looks pretty good. I don't know if we have what we would call gold standard causal evidence about the Great Society programs. I do think the logic is there. I think that the logic is there. Certainly, I talk about this a little tiny bit. I think that the logic is there. There's a little bit of evidence that this had an effect on Italian birth rates. I cite that in the book. I couldn't find a terrible lot. But when you think about finding plausible sources of variation when you introduce an entire country to a new policy, it's pretty tough to sort of… right?

Pakaluk: But certainly, these things are happening contemporaneously, and if we think about the Great Society programs as very generally attempting to provide for people, as a matter of a guarantee, the types of things that used to be provided by family ties— and I mean that very broadly, not just old age care, but also unemployment, welfare services, those kinds of things, would largely have been provided by families, family ties, and the next best thing would have been church communities. So, if we think very generally about the Great Society as attempting to sort of fill in for, perhaps we can call it a safety net, fill in the gaps, but then turning the gap into a guarantee for everybody, [then] we can certainly make the argument that it's plausible that this sort of decreases the demand for family ties.

Beckworth: Yes, on the margin, there's an incentive there that should make a difference. And you bring up a very interesting point in your book that there's a free rider problem here. I had never thought of this, that these programs are there to support you, but they assume that there will be a population in the future who can fund them. But lo and behold, those same programs are disincentivizing that population growth.

Pakaluk: Right. I think it's--

Beckworth: The irony is rich.

Pakaluk: I think that the irony is rich there. That's right. Maybe some of those programs could be tweaked to solve that free rider problem. But I think that you'd have to find some kind of way of including the contribution that you make to those programs by paying taxes. You'd somehow have to make that linked to the contributions of children as well. Nobody likes to talk about that. So, right now, my Social Security payment is going to be linked to my years of work in the labor market, but not to my years of contributing children to next generations.

Beckworth: You'd be doing very well in that.

Pakaluk: I'd be doing well, but I would say that, to my knowledge, nobody has proposed linking contributions of children into these sorts of multigenerational programs. But, yes, I think that there's a type of free rider problem that's inherent there. It's an overlapping generations free rider problem.

Beckworth: I like to joke when I talk to people with large families. You are true economic patriots because you're helping this very issue of future labor supply. Alright, so, we've touched on a number of reasons that there's been a decline. One last area before we move on and get into these 55 ladies that you visited and, really, the interesting stories that they provide, and that is ideas, the intellectual. So, we've touched on this already, but Paul Ehrlich, he had the book, The Population Bomb, in 1968, and there were others like him, but tell [us] about his influence. Do you think he also maybe changed the slope of that decline at all, or was it just part of this broader story?

The Influence and Impact of Paul Ehrlich

Pakaluk: That's a good question. I'm not sure that I have a settled answer on whether I think— but I do think that ideas matter. I think that not only ideas matter, but I think ideas matter. There's certainly reason to connect Paul Ehrlich to other academics working at the same time who were also persuaded that we were going to see a population bomb, to connect those academics to some of the intellectual ideas that went into China's one-child policy, for instance, and generally creating a climate in which it became fashionable for, we'll say, elites and policymakers, certainly in the West and abroad, to believe that it would be in their interest to aim to shift these demographic variables towards what would be considered, at the time, the common good. So, I think it had to have played a role. I certainly tend to think that the micro-level climate plays a greater role, at least in the free economies. Of course, in China, we know it's not free and household decisions weren't free. But yes, I certainly wouldn't want to neglect the role of the idea producers, yes.

Beckworth: It is, again, ironic that Paul Ehrlich and his ideas ended up contributing to a one-child policy. So, maybe you could say that they were going to decline anyways, but this really was more dramatic, maybe lower than it would have otherwise been. So, it hastened and maybe expedited this journey to low growth, which, now, China's bearing the cost of that. And to me, the irony is, from a US perspective, China has a big problem that we create, at least our scholars help create, and push over there. So, I think that's rich. Then, again, go back to the de-growthers today. I don't think that they have a lot of influence, but man, they seem to get media hits. Every so often, the New York Times or Vox will have a story on them, and I'm like, "Folks, the solution to climate change is not fewer kids, but more kids," because that's where ideas or solutions to climate change can be found.

Pakaluk: Yes, that's right. I think, as you said, it's a little bit rich. It certainly points to, I would say, the importance of a climate of humility about how much we can know about what will be right for people in the future. I think that there were brave people, at the same time, who, although they didn't have the national stage— I think that Ben Wattenberg was one of them, who was a scholar at AEI in the '70s and the '80s— There were brave people who didn't have the limelight, who said, "Well, really looking down deep, I don't think that these are the right projections."

Pakaluk: But I think that it absolutely points to letting the experiments play out on smaller levels. If you just said, "Well, we're just going to let these different Chinese provinces figure out what's working for them," but you institute these major experimental changes at the policy level and the level of [an] enormous country— If you get it wrong, that's a very large policy disaster, is you get that wrong. So, I think that it would certainly, at least, encourage a little bit of, we could say, humility about how to do policy at the national level.

Beckworth: One last question on the ideas and influence of intellectuals. Has their influence died down at these international organizations? So, the Club of Rome, and I'm assuming that the World Bank, the IMF are now more worried about population decline than maybe they were in the '70s and '80s? Is that a fair reading?

Pakaluk: It doesn't seem like it yet.

Beckworth: Oh, really?

Pakaluk: It doesn't seem like it yet. I know I haven't done a deep dive into the recent reports. Certainly, you're starting to see it get mentioned, but it does seem as if the general elite opinion is still that we have too many people. Yes, which, to me— I think it takes a long time to recover from these received views, I think. And I just thought to myself— you had mentioned Paul Ehrlich and the power of ideas, and I think that it would be unfair, also, not to mention Thomas Malthus, and as economists are sitting here thinking about—

Beckworth: He’s legendary.

Pakaluk: -He's legendary, and I think that it's one of the reasons why your question about today— Have people caught up to this? I think that this concern about too many people— it seems to be the sort of thing that people are always in danger of falling into, because it happens over and over. Maybe there's something visceral there. I've looked at some of the little bits of anthropological research, and we'll probably talk about housing a little bit, but that talks about how we tend not to react well to crowding [and] circumstances of crowding. So, I think that there's something innate in us that maybe fears crowding.

Pakaluk: And so, I don't want to say that Thomas Malthus was sort of on the right track. I think he was on the wrong track, his essay on population, but certainly, we don't have to pick out Paul Ehrlich as one heinous example of getting it wrong, that there's some kind of tendency to constantly be concerned about overcrowding, overpopulation. I do think it constantly can be argued back against in the ways that lots of good scholars have. You know, Malthus influences Darwin tremendously, and Darwin influences the eugenicists, and someone like John Maynard Keynes was really, really interested in this, and Keynes was a lifelong eugenicist, from his earliest days at university to, really, the end of his life. [He was] really taken with these ideas. I really, definitely want to spread this backwards a little bit, spread the blame around for the ideas.

Beckworth: So, Paul Ehrlich is maybe a manifestation--

Pakaluk: He's a manifestation.

Beckworth: --A very prominent and thoughtful manifestation of a human tendency to be worried about too many people. So, okay, fair enough. Fair enough. But we would encourage any listeners out there at the IMF, World Bank, wherever you may be at these international institutions, read Paul Romer, Chad Jones, [and] endogenous growth theory to start off.

Pakaluk: Absolutely.

Beckworth: And, of course, this wonderful book by Catherine. Alright, let's talk about the ladies that you interviewed, again. You're looking at 5% of the population that chose to have five families or more, the reasons for why they did it, and you're doing this for what reason? Why ask them versus the other side?

The Motivation and Background for *Hannah’s Children*

Pakaluk: Yes, I guess I would make the comparison to the discovery of the smallpox vaccine. When you look at something that's consequential— and we've talked about how consequential this is, demographic trends— but, at the time, smallpox is pretty consequential. It's wreaking havoc. People are dying left and right. And so, one of the insights that was really important was to see that, well, actually, some people aren't getting smallpox and dying, or if they get it, they get a very mild case.

Pakaluk: So, there's this neat insight. You can learn something about the thing that's bad by looking at who's immune from the thing that's bad. So, there's kind of a weird logic there, and I thought that maybe that could be what's going on. So, the reason to study them— these outliers, these statistical outliers, these women who've chosen to have big families— isn't because that's where we all need to go, or to hold that up as a normative picture of what, I think, would be a flourishing society, for everybody to have five or six children, but actually to dig into the questions of motive and agency and see if there's anything that can be learned from that.

Pakaluk: So, that was the reason to go and talk to that side of things. Of course, I actually hope, in the future, to talk to the other side so that you don't have to do one project first. But I thought that that would be interesting, and it seemed like a piece of the conversation that's missing. So, you mentioned Paul Morland's book, which is coming up. I think it's just released, No One Left, which I had a chance to read. But a lot of scholars who acknowledge that there are these outlying populations, these 5%, these people with unusually large families— they often refer to them as breeding cults.

Beckworth: Wow.

Pakaluk: So, listen, if you just dismiss these outliers and say that they're probably just in a cult— what comes to mind with a cult is people who aren't thinking clearly or people who maybe are departing from ordinary rationality in various ways. So, then, the conclusion there would be, from a policy perspective, that there's not much to learn. So, if you think back to those milkmaids who were immune from a smallpox, if you just said, "Who knows, they're just nuts or they're just wackos--

Beckworth: They're just freaks of nature.

Pakaluk: --They're just freaks of nature," [then] you wouldn't have learned one of the most important things that we needed to learn to defeat smallpox, and I think that that was my question here, was, is there something that we can learn from these breeding cults? Of course, I didn't really think that they were cults.

Beckworth: Well, I'm glad you [wrote] the book, if, for nothing else, to help people see this, to open their eyes. Your exchange with Macron, I think that that was useful, for nothing else, to say, "Hey, you can be a highly educated PhD from Harvard and have eight children and live a meaningful life. So, don't view everyone in that group as a breeding cult.” That's just awful. So, you pick 55 women [that have] 5 or more children. I’m just curious, how did you find these women? How did you reach out to them?

Pakaluk: Well, as you know, it's not in the standard playbook for economists to do this kind of work. I read a lot of work by sociologists that I really admired. Thinking back to my graduate school days, a book that really inspired me was Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’ study of out-of-wedlock births in urban areas, why poor women have children before motherhood. And I just was really struck by this. I thought, "Wow, so, you can go in places and talk to people."

Pakaluk: I wonder, who does that and who trains you to do that? So, fast forward to when I started this project, I just picked up the best practices from the sociological qualitative research. So, of course, this isn't a random sample. You're not canvassing the whole country. What you do is you pick your regions. So, we pick 10 regions around the country, reasonably diverse, in different parts of the country, blue states, red states. Then, in each city, you maybe start with a contact at a university, or a friend, somebody that you know, and you say, "Hey, where are families hanging out in the city?"

Pakaluk: By and large, they will point you to some churches, or you might find the Facebook Moms of Greater Dallas, for instance, that sort of thing. And so, you try to find these places, [like] YMCAs, where families might hang out, and you post flyers, and you hope that people see your flyers. That's the first step, and then the second step is that when people see your flyer, if they want to apply for your study, they have to then take a survey. You don't know anything about them, but you ask them for things, [like] some demographic information, maybe what religion they are, if any, race and ethnicity, some family background, [and] maybe even zip codes. You can maybe get a sense of family income information. Then, from among that group, we had about 500 or 600 people apply from all over the country. Then, you actually just go in and choose a reasonably balanced sample. So, you handpick this, yes.

Beckworth: It's a lot of work.

Pakaluk: It's a lot of work, yes.

Beckworth: It's not just plugging some data into Stata and running some regressions.

Pakaluk: No, that's right. I will definitely admit to being that economist who, a little bit into this project, thought, "This is not easier. This is not easier than quantitative work." 

Beckworth: You remind me, though, of the trend in economics today where people are looking into more administrative data sets. They have to dig. They have to bring it together. There's a lot of work in finding original results, and that's what you're doing. You're shedding light, again, on a group of people that's not well understood or appreciated, the 5%. So, let's talk about what you found. Why are they having larger families? And I know religion is probably in everyone's mind who is listening, but that's not the only factor. In fact, one of the ladies was not religious.

Why Are Women Having Larger Families?

Pakaluk: That's right.

Beckworth: Lauren, correct?

Pakaluk: That's right, yes. Lauren, she checked the box, is Jewish. She and her husband— she said, “We keep a Jewish household,” but she said that the having kids part is separate from the Jewish part. So, she didn't want to connect her religion and her childbearing, as most of the other women that I talked to would have said that they were connected in some way. And so, right, that's exactly what I wanted to get beyond, was that we already knew that women who have more than average children, numbers of children, are more likely to be religious.

Pakaluk: We know that birth rates across countries vary with religious participation and religious attendance. I kind wanted to know why. It’s this question of, is what's going on something that's cult-like behavior? Like the pope or the rabbi says, "You got to have a lot of kids [or] you're not a good person." I don't know. Something like that. I found story after story of very reasonable expressions of things that people valued about having children. In other words, the benefits, expressed in terms of value and demand, exceeded the costs, and they talked about the costs. “These are the things that were hard, the things that I had to overcome, and these are the things that have [had] benefits and values.”

Pakaluk: I point out that, in the stories, I asked people about what got them started, like, “What did you want when you had your first kid? Tell me about the fifth kid and the sixth kid. What kept you going?” So, I like to say how it started and how it's going, but by and large, what I heard was a story that wasn't that shocking for an economist, that women explained that they had reasons that were very understandable, [and] we'll say intelligible motives. They believed that having children was part of their marriage, like it was the purpose of their marriage. They got married, maybe in their 20s, and thought, "This is what we do when we're married." Frequently, this was motivated by, we'll say, a biblical worldview, that our marriages are meant to bring children into the world.

Pakaluk: In some cases, why did people get started? In some cases, they grew up with lots of siblings, and they thought it was a great way to live. Other women said, "I grew up with no siblings, and I always wanted some siblings." So, in each case, there's a reason, a reason that got them started. Then, we investigated the reasons that kept them going. Obviously, if you had your first kid and thought it was a total disaster, you stopped. You didn't make it into my sample.

Pakaluk: So then, what I tried to document was the types of things that people shared about, starting out with, say, a belief that a child might be a blessing, a religious blessing, something that's an eternal relationship. That was the kind of thing that I heard a lot of. They talked about moving from that to a more experiential understanding of— or a description of an experience of having children where they received a lot of joy, and they overcame an initial— I think this is important, but they reported overcoming an initial sense of, [what] we would say in economics, learning by doing.

Pakaluk: So, at the beginning, "Oh, this is really hard, and I'm not sure what I'm doing, and I wasn't good at it." And so, they described how they kept going, maybe for religious reasons, convinced that the children were blessings. They were enjoying their children, but still finding it really hard. But then they started to report that, well, the hardship decreased the marginal changes to their lifestyle. For each additional child decreased, the joy was increasing, and then you get this funny dynamic where those of them that started young enough— that sometimes you saw this thing where, maybe initially, they thought three or four kids would be a nice number to have, [or] maybe even just two or three. But then, there was this shift from where they said, "Well, yes, actually, I could be open to another one. This is bringing me a lot of joy, and my kids are enjoying this a lot."

Pakaluk: So, really, fundamentally, [it’s] a story about, I guess I would say, human agency and rationality, that there are reasons that the benefits outweigh the costs. But what I found was that the benefits and the costs on both sides are not monetary. They're not the types of things that we would normally reduce to monetary benefits and costs, and that seems to be pretty important in a policy universe where, for the most part, the tools that policymakers have at their disposal, to change variables like this, are monetary.

Beckworth: Yes, so, in your book, you talk about a unified account of costs and benefits, about 2/3rds in, and I found that very useful because you’ve got to look at more than just the costs. The Wall Street Journal article that I referenced earlier, they had all of these people, and there were these stories, and most of them were simply talking about the costs. "Well, if I get a kid, I can't do this activity or that activity." And so, it's important to look at both sides of the ledger. Beyond that, though, it's also important to realize that we may not always know the benefits ahead of time, and I guess that's kind of what you're getting at here. You had that first child. It sounds like many of these ladies didn't know what they were getting into, but over time, they recognized, "Man, there's amazing benefits to having children."

Pakaluk: I think that's right. I think that I've used the language of experiential good, learning by doing, but I think that experiential good captures it. I think that it's pretty easy to imagine the kinds of things that might be costs, like I can't take a vacation, or, at least for a while, I won't take that vacation, or I lose some freedom or something. But the types of things that I think parents often account as benefits are oftentimes the kinds of things that emerge much later in childbearing.

Pakaluk: Just yesterday, I tweeted something about the joys of taking my 12-year-old to Prague. Now, I can guarantee you that when I was having my kids, when they were babies, I wasn't thinking about what fun it would be to take them to Prague. I just happened to have that opportunity last year, and I think that those are the kinds of things that have to emerge, and they're probably very personal [and] unique to different families and the kinds of things you enjoy doing. But I think that, how would you know? Most of us don't grow up with 12-year-old little sisters. And so, what would you know about it?

Beckworth: Well, that's the challenge here, right? If you want to encourage this, somehow you have to coach them along. "Hey, look, it's going to get better. It's going to be meaningful. It's going to be unique to you. I can't tell you exactly [how]."

Pakaluk: That's right. I would just say that what's standard about childbearing decisions these days, I think, in part because of the— especially among college-educated Americans— I think what's standard is to think about the desired family size, kind of have your kids reasonably close together if you're going to have one or two or three. Then, you move on. You get back to work, or you do the next thing that is planned. So, you're making a decision about your final family size when your babies are still quite little, and I think that's pretty normal. It actually makes good sense.

Pakaluk: But the trouble is, for most people, we'll make a decision that's fairly permanent, and then move on to do something else, and by the time your kids get old enough to say, "Actually, this is pretty fun," or, "This is pretty great," or, "I didn't anticipate how neat it would be to talk about the thing that I do, my work, with my kid—" and this is a really common thing that people tell you. They say, "Wow, who knew? I've got a kid who's interested in public choice. This is so much fun. They're calling me from college and saying, ‘Mom, what about this?’" That sort of thing, you don't think about that when you've got a two-year-old, and you're saying, "This is kind of tough. I'm really tired. I just don't think I can do this again."

Beckworth: Yes, it's so fascinating. So, how did you pick five as a cutoff number for the big families? And I'll just tell you my perspective on this.

Pakaluk: Sure.

Beckworth: So, we were planning on having four children. We ended up getting three. In my mind, [with] four, you could have a vehicle, a normal vehicle. [With] five, you suddenly have to get a big, big SUV, or— it just seemed more complicated. For some reason, in my mind, at least, there's a threshold between four and five, but I'm curious to hear how you picked five.

Pakaluk: So, I think that four would have been a perfectly good number for this book. In retrospect, I think that that would have been fine. Listen, I knew that I wanted to interview people who had a different approach to their demand for children; in layman's terms, doing something different. So, I didn't want people who had two, and then they were trying for a different gender child, which is pretty common. I had three boys before I had a girl, so you can even— in the four children, you can be in that, because the survey poster said, “I'm looking for people who would consider their family size purposeful,” and somebody who's trying for a boy or trying for a girl at the third or the fourth child would certainly say that they're doing something purposeful.

Pakaluk: But I wanted people who are really demanding children for their own sakes, and I wanted to try to figure out why. So, I knew it was somewhere in the four to five [range]. I just knew that by five, you really have eliminated the people going for the second sex of the child, but I think that four would have been perfectly fine, because, certainly, four is more than double the national average, and certainly a very different phenomenon, but I'm sorry to have excluded you.

Beckworth: No, this is good, this is good. I think that five actually makes sense in my mind, but I'm not the researcher on this topic. Okay, final question. So, we care about macroeconomic growth on this show, as our listeners do, and we've been talking about this problem of demographic decline, and as you talk about in your book, pronatal policies have not been very successful, they're very costly. Even the countries that have been most aggressive— Hungary, they seem to have had little success. So, what would you recommend? Can you recommend anything? This seems like a tough nut to crack.

Exploring Pronatal Policy Recommendations

Pakaluk: Yes, so I think, just to reiterate what you said, yes, the big tax and transfer plans— lots of countries have tried it. Hungary is the most notable recently. Last year's numbers for Hungary's total fertility rate do not look good at all. It looked like they had forestalled shrinking, or decreasing birth rates, but no longer— they're decreasing again. So, they haven't really worked very well. I think that the thing to think about is the educational pipeline. So, for me, the number one policy that I would want to recommend to a policymaker, if I could get somebody's ear, would be universal school choice.

Pakaluk: Why do I say that? For a couple of reasons. One is that I think that it's right to think of falling birth rates as a value or demand problem, if you will. Meaning, the people who are doing something different today are people who have managed, either through their personal experiences [or] through their church communities, to come to see the value of having children as something to plan for. If you just follow the standard educational pipeline today, and you go to finish high school, and you go to college, and then you maybe do a little bit of graduate work, and you do your career for a little while, [then] you are looking [at] the standard, get married around 30, and have your first kid well into your 30s.

Pakaluk: We know a lot about that pipeline. It puts women starting their families in a time when their fertility is already declining, and a lot of young women aren't aware of this. And so, it looks like a monolithic pathway. What we know from a lot of econ research— and I really respect Bryan Caplan’s work on this, about the school system— [is] that these monolithic pathways, they don't work for everybody, and they certainly don't work very well for women finishing up their formal education, maybe in [their] mid-20s, late 20s. Then, maybe getting some work experience, and then thinking, "I can start my family now."

Pakaluk: So, I don't know what the right pipeline looks like, and I think it's probably individual, what it would look like, but I do know that busting up this monolithic, these discrete chunks— K-8, you've got four years of high school, you've got four years of college. We know that it doesn't need to look that way. There are all kinds of micro-schooling, hybrid schooling. There are small private schools that accelerate. If you want to know what it can look like, look at professional athletes. If you go back over 30 or 40 years, you've kids that grew up like phenoms, like Jordan Spieth. You go, "Where did Jordan Spieth go to school? What did he do?" And you realize, "Oh, he didn't go to a regular school, he has tutors and private— These things are pretty available.

Pakaluk: So, that's the one reason, is because these timelines for women aren't really working very well. So, universal school choice, I think, would allow for two types of things. One is innovation and experimentation in how long it has to take to finish, what we would call, the types of skills that we would consider basic education, and I think that a lot of thoughtful people would suggest that it doesn't have to take as long as it takes now.

Pakaluk: So, one is that it would provide more opportunities to innovate on the education front and provide different types of pipelines, so that young women who know that they would like to have families— and that's not everybody, but there are a lot of young women. They write to me every day, and they say, "I'd really like to do this, but I'd also like to finish my education." So, you say, that's great. It doesn't have to take you 25 years to do all of these things. We could have more innovation on that front.

Pakaluk: The other reason why universal school choice may help is that you have lots and lots of church communities that really value marriage and family, and they would like to be able to offer robust schooling options to families, but they can't really compete on the fiscal side, because families can't afford to pay twice for school. So, at the moment, this educational monopoly on paying for public schooling, I think— of course, we're seeing it starting to erode a little bit. But I think that if we allowed— we can call this religious liberty or religious freedom, but educational freedom— I think that allowing for more churches and church communities to be able to meet families' needs for an education that allows parents to transmit their values— be they biblical or what have you— I think that that would allow for a greater diversity of pathways to family formation.

Beckworth: So, there are some states now that are doing universal vouchers, [like] Florida and a few others. So, I guess we'll have to wait several decades to see what happens, but potentially, we might see a fertility uptick in these states.

Pakaluk: Yes, that's right. That's actually very high on my list of papers that I'd like to do next, is to really look at what we know about private schooling, religious schooling. Are there things we might know even looking at older data as to--

Beckworth: Okay, we don’t have to wait.

Pakaluk: Well, I think that the data is available if we go find it, but I'll have to pick and choose, I think.

Beckworth: Okay, well, we look forward to that.

Pakaluk: That's a paper, hopefully in a year or two, that I can find for us.

Beckworth: Alright, our guest today has been Catherine Pakaluk. Her book is Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. Get your copy. Catherine, thank you for coming on the program.

Pakaluk: You're welcome.