Lyman Stone on America’s falling birth rate

I always knew I wanted to have children. And because all my jokes are terrible and I genuinely enjoy chatting about the weather, it just felt kinda predestined. Everybody I know knew I wanted kids. I put it in my online dating profiles (do not recommend if you are trying to land a date). As I changed jobs and locations in my twenties, becoming a dad was the only immutable part of the vision I had for the future.

In late 2023, my dream came true: My wife gave birth to our daughter. She’s funny and exhausting and wonderful.

I expected to love being a dad, and I do! I also expected my friends and younger family to become parents at around the same time. That has not proven true. Most of my friends are not parents yet. Some are considering trying. Others never want to.

It’s not just my community: The birth rate has been falling rapidly in the United States. In 2005, “births per woman” (a wonky metric that measures how many kids the average woman has) was just over 2. Now it’s about 1.6.

And this is not an American phenomenon. The birth rate is declining across the world, from Germany to Japan to India. Many countries have tried to convince their citizens to have more babies. Those efforts have largely failed.

But now there is a growing movement in the US that thinks it can buck the trend. They call themselves pronatalists. The group is ideologically mixed, but its loudest champions (see: Elon Musk and JD Vance) are conservative.

Lyman Stone is one of the better-known pronatalist academics. Stone is a demographer and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He’s also a prolific poster on X.

It’s worth nothing that Stone is a conservative Christian, and that informs his work. His argument that the decline in marriage is behind the falling birth rate is heavily debated. But he’s an influential figure in an influential movement. And I think he makes a compelling case that, even if you don’t share his politics or religious beliefs, you should share his concern about the number of kids we’re not having. And so, when I was asked to host an episode of The Highlight Podcast, where Vox journalists shine a light on people doing interesting work, I gave Stone a call.

Below are some selections from our conversation. Be sure to listen to the whole thing.

Tell me what you do, who you are, and why what you’re doing matters.

I’m a demographer. I research people — changes in people and in population. In particular, my specialty is fertility. Pretty much everything in life ultimately touches on fertility. There’s no part of our society that is not in some sense affected by reproduction for the simple fact that we’re only ever one generation away from the end of society. If people decided not to have kids, there’d be no future society. It’s that simple. It is the central question of civilization.

What’s the best argument you can make that people should care about [the falling birth rate]?

There are so many reasons to want more people. One is that people are on the whole pretty good. You know, I love my wife. If my wife hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t be able to love her. Maybe I would love someone else just as much. Maybe. Or maybe a tiny bit less. Because none of the other people that I’ve met in my life are people that I think I would love as much as her. Each additional person genuinely contributes something excellent and good to society. Now, occasionally you also get real duds. You get serial killers in the mix. But in general, people are good.

I care a lot about progress and innovation. I want a society that continues to advance human flourishing in really profound, meaningful, and important ways. I don’t want to just see marginal improvements in human life. I want my children to enjoy a vastly better life than I do.

Innovation is actually a simple equation. It is population size times “how many of those children had nutritional deficiencies in childhood?” times “What are the institutional and economic returns to risk taking?”

So basically, I’m not a super smart person, okay? I’m never going to invent a cure for cancer. I might write a paper someday that eight other academics think is cool. The people who are able to do really groundbreaking, innovative stuff that lifts humanity to a genuinely greater level of well-being are rare. They are very rare. If you have a bigger population, you literally get more of them.

Now, beyond that, you’ve got to make sure those kids are cared for. It doesn’t matter if the kid is born and they’re really capable and have a lot of potential but are malnourished and starving and stunted and don’t have normal brain development. They get lead poisoning. Then they’re not going to be very productive. So that’s that second thing: They need to have healthy environments.

And then the third part is: You’ve got to make sure that you don’t live under communism where they’re punished for being creative and innovative and entrepreneurial. You need to have actual rewards for risk-taking, entrepreneurship, and innovation. In America we have plenty of rewards for that, some would argue too much.

But regardless, the point is, each additional person, each human born into the world, is a roll of the dice. But this is actually a loaded dice. Usually you roll slightly above the historic average because life is getting better. We’re getting richer and more prosperous and living longer and all these things. Usually you roll like a four. But every so often you roll a six. Every so often a child is born and they grow up in an environment where they can invent calculus or they can write the Constitution or they can do something of great benefit that lifts the tide for everybody.

It really is the case that adding people to society does make us all more productive. It gives us more people to sell to, more people to buy from, more people to love, more people to have as friends, more people to exchange ideas with. It gives more people who actually generate the real fountainhead of all productivity, which is ideas.

People are having fewer kids as the world gets wealthier and wealthier. Women have better leave options. People have more resources than they did 60 years ago. How do you account for that?

At the median, we’re way better off. Who is the median person in America? They’re like 42 years old or something. Okay. But how fertile are you when you’re 42? Not very. Once you realize that young men’s income is their main marriageable trait, then you have to ask: Well, what has happened to 20-something men’s incomes over the last 30 years? And the answer is it has declined.

For the US and for other countries where we’ve seen this?

For almost every country. And the reason is not that we became poorer as a society. It’s because the need for more skills in our economy means peak income is coming later in life and there’s this more steep trajectory.

So you’re poorer younger in life, you spend more years in school, you spend more years in internships and this kind of thing, and you hit peak income later and then you live much longer. And you’re very wealthy for many of those later years. Okay. So overall, people are better off, they’re healthier, they’re wealthier, they’re more prosperous. All great stuff. I’m all very in favor of being rich, happy and healthy. But the point is, if you want people to get married, make 25-year-old men rich.

And I know that sounds so regressive. But I’m not trying to do some gross incel thing here. I’m not saying, “Women just owe it to me.” No, the men are bad marriage candidates! I understand why women are like, “I don’t want to marry that guy.”