The Truth About Falling Fertility Rates and Misleading Statistics

Join us in this deep dive into the alarming trends in global fertility rates. Drawing extensively from Zvi's Fertility Roundup #4, we uncover the harsh realities contradicting the usual claims by bodies like the UN. We discuss two main theses: the halting narrative of fertility rate stabilization and the cultural key to solving this crisis, dismissing non-cultural solutions such as housing or income adjustments. We'll cover intriguing statistical misinterpretations, like the infamous study misrepresenting married women's happiness, and counter controversial views on the role of cities and the perceived evils within modern and traditional gender roles. From analyzing tweets by Melissa Kearney and Lyman Stone to touching upon socioeconomic impacts on fertility, this episode is a comprehensive look at this critical issue, including thought-provoking cultural insights from Japan and Korea.

Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today we are going to do a very, very, very statistics heavy episode on fertility rates.

And it's going to be a collection of statistics to focus on just how bad the situation has gotten. There's a lot coming from Zvi's fertility roundup number four. I love his

Speaker: fertility roundups. Yes!

Speaker 2: Fantastic stuff. And a lot coming from random graphs and stuff like that that didn't find a reason to fit into another episode.

Okay. What we're going to find as we go through this is two overarching theses. One is the people who thought that this was going to level off this year or we were going to begin to see signs of it slowing this year were wrong. There is very little evidence that that is happening, but this is what the UN and the urban monoculture claims every year.

Here, I'll put a graph on screen. Of the U. N. S. Yearly predicted fertility rates in which you'll see if it's like going off a cliff in every country and every year, the U. N. S. Like this [00:01:00] is the year. It's just gonna stabilize out of nowhere. So, I think that we're seeing that narrative is being broken.

And then the other big. thing that we're seeing is a reinforcement of what we have said from the beginning is that culture is the only realistic way to fix this. And every solution that you attempt that is not cultural, whether it is making houses cheaper or making people earn more, Or even forcing one partner to live at home is not going to resolve this issue.

It's just going to make things worse, which seen in the statistics, but what we'll see is your heroes will continue to see this in the statistics. So the first errant tweet here that I wanted to go over that I thought was really interesting. As he was commenting, the culture is all too eager to tell us that children or even marriage will make us miserable When it is not even true if you discount the long term.

The latest example of this, where there was a widely distributed claim in a new book that said married women are miserable because they report [00:02:00] being unhappy when their spouse isn't around. But, what the study actually meant, by quote unquote spouse absent was no longer living with them, not stepped out of the room.

Which is the way he implied it. He's like, when a spouse isn't looking over their shoulders, they say that they're less happy. What it really meant when the spouse is dead, they're less happy.

Speaker: Yeah. Missing, presumed dead. Yeah. I'm probably less happy.

Speaker 2: Goodness gracious.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker 2: But I love that a lot of people, like, I actually remember when that stat was going around.

And I was like, that's pretty wild. That seems really out of line with what I've seen in my life. I don't know,

Speaker: but I think what made it actually work, and what made so many people misunderstand it, is this implication that When the husband's back is turned when he's out of earshot, suddenly people say other, you know, wives say different things.

It's exactly the trope that was pulled in that ballerina farms article that they that that they later categorized as a hit piece implying [00:03:00] that when Hannah's husband left the room Wait, sorry. Is her name Hannah? When, when the husband left the room that she then talked about getting an epidural and then talked about how it was kind of awesome and it was just great.

And then there's this understanding that spouses will say very different things about their partners when their partners are not present. So, yeah, I don't know. I can understand how people definitely believed that and were very, very credulous. But it's so, man, it's a case study in how this stuff can be used to mislead people.

I hate it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So you are happy you're married, by the way. You know, these, these people are lying to you, but they need to have you believe so much of this movement is just cope around. When I say this movement, I mean, the parts of the urban monoculture, which glorify a single lifestyle cope around failing to secure a partner just as much as a lot of the incel movement is when they act like women are evil or like these demonic creatures destroying [00:04:00] society.

When, if you look at voting patterns, that just isn't true. Cool. of married women.

It might be single women are evil and destroying society, but married women are on team civilization. Okay. So, but actually do you have any thoughts on that point, Simone? On,

Speaker: sorry, on which, which point?

Speaker 2: They, This view that sort of the incel MGTOW parts of the movement have of women that they are the force of evil that has created the urban monoculture and all these forces destroying society.

And I just, if you look at statistics around married women, that's just not true. It's really this single woman, urban monoculture mind minded person.

Speaker: I just see these things as more systemic issues and, you know, there, there are many elements of society that feel more feminized now, but that's not inherently the problem.

It's just a symptom of a larger systemic problem that can't really be characterized by tropes.

Speaker 2: All right. So, here is an [00:05:00] interesting one. This is a tweet by Melissa Kearney. She says, the Social Security's actuaries are still bullish on the idea that U. S. women are going to start having more babies than they are, than they've been having.

Quote, birth rates are assumed to increase from recent very low levels to an ultimate level of 1. 9 children per woman for 2040 and thereafter. Why, she says, the trustees continue to assume that recent low birth rates of period fertility are in part indicative of a gradual shift towards older ages of childbearing for younger birth cohorts.

Quote, Marco Jurek. When we say, Our core societal institutions are fragile and dysfunctional because they no longer suit the circumstances to which they were designed but cannot change. This is what we mean. And so here, what she's talking about is other people have pointed out that like institutions like the social securities actuaries were created during a time of stable fertility rates, and [00:06:00] they just can't make the math work if they actually Show what's really happening.

So they keep saying, Oh, women are just choosing to have kids later, which we know from the data isn't true. And I'm going to put some graphs on screen here that show both what they're, what we're seeing. Right. And so you can see the, the birth rates going down per generation, but here, if you look at the age of birth by the various age groups, which now I'm putting on stage here what you're seeing is it is not moving later.

Okay.