When Progressives Try to Solve Fertility Collapse their Answers Are Idiotic

Malcolm and Simone react to a progressive writer's absurd proposal to address declining birth rates - punitive taxes if both spouses work! They explain how this would just discourage marriage and responsibility, worsening societal outcomes. Instead, tax incentives align better with reality, especially if focused on people having kids younger. Pets as child substitutes comes up again too.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] And so here's what I suggest we do. Okay. I say, and I'm quoting here. I say that I'd massively increased marginal tax rate on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity costs for having children. he goes further punitive marginal tax rates on the 2nd earner in a household would knock many women and some men out of the labor force by lowering the opportunity cost of having children because there'd be no career to give up

You serious? You don't know. Everybody knows you never go full retarded.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Wild. And I remember, have you heard of Zilogon Wild? I love Zilogon Wild, it's fantastic. Made me remember the house on Batman Road, which you like seriously thought about buying. That like Yes! Like it was a cult, but it had all these like It was a mansion! It was a mansion,

Malcolm Collins: it had a bunch of It was a super cheap mansion, because it looked insane.

And it was on a place called [00:01:00] Batman Road. Yeah,

Simone Collins: and you were like so ready to buy it. You're like, it's a fixer upper. And I'm like, this was clearly owned by a cult before. Why do you want this house? And I wonder, you know, like if, if we bought that house, would it have shaped us? Do the homes that people live in shape people?

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I know that I love the house we got. We definitely got ahead on this cottagecore trend here. Right. You know, I see, I don't think I would

Simone Collins: be wearing a medieval corset. You know, a chamise, you'd be wearing what? Like in the house on Batman Road? I would probably have to be wearing a beige jumpsuit because that was the vibe.

You know,

Malcolm Collins: that was the vibe. I love it. Hey, I don't know. That could work for us as well.

Simone Collins: So,

Malcolm Collins: anyway, we've got to get into our topic today. Oh, yeah. So, we read an article by somebody being like, look, progressives are finally waking up to fertility rates. You know, and they are, and I, I see this [00:02:00] repeatedly in progressive pieces, you know, the New York Times did a front page piece on this recently, but the crazy thing is, is I thought as progressives woke up to this, right?

They would more and more, and I've always, you know, taken this position. But they've used it to try to give handouts and so creatively, you know, I point out and I'm going to put up on the screen the graph that shows that if you sort studies by how large their margin of error is, what you will see is all of the studies that shows this matter and have a huge margin of error and all of the studies that show this doesn't help at all have a very small margin of error.

If you look at something like the program that was in Hungary, where they spent literally 5 percent of their GDP on this last year. So the year before Alaska, we just passed the New Year's.

They got their fertility reset by like 1. 6%. Considering that, like, it's falling like 13 percent this year in Korea, like you're getting double digits declines in a lot of places. It's irrelevant. It's not going to fix anything. And so it's like, well, they're going to, Try to use it to support those programs.

[00:03:00] And it's, it's, it's stupid and it's not going to work, but you know, at least, you know, they're part of the conversation now. Well, well,

to my surprise they were dumber than I could have even conceived what they actually It

Simone Collins: was worse than handouts, right? I mean, the thing is like handouts, it's, it's a. It's a nuanced form of dumb, right? Like in that money does make a difference, just not nearly enough of a difference. You know, it's, it's like saying, Oh, I'll help fund your trip to Europe.

I'm going to give you 50, you know? Oh, thanks. That's definitely going to get me across the Atlantic. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I mean, This article here was in Quillet, you know, that's like a Atlantic's, I think like mainstream publication or something or like,

Simone Collins: like millet.

Malcolm Collins: Quillet. And the article was called Misunderstanding the Fertility Crisis.

Of course, [00:04:00] like, an article where he misunderstands the fertility crisis. But of course, he's implying that all of us are misunderstanding the fertility crisis because we think that culture has something to do with this. But Hold on. So I will read to you. So first, one thing I find really interesting is he talked about how he began to realize this was a problem is and he heard his conservative friends who like worked at Fox News saying that they were working on the fertility rate crisis.

He's like, I'd never heard of this before. And so I looked at the data and I begrudgingly suppose that it is a real problem and we probably should do something. And so here's what I suggest we do. Okay. I say, and I'm quoting here. I say that I'd massively increased marginal tax rate on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity costs for having children.

And then in another part of the article, he goes further punitive marginal tax rates on the 2nd earner in a household would knock many women and some [00:05:00] men out of the labor force by lowering the opportunity cost of having children because there'd be no career to give up disempower

Simone Collins: families.

It's fine.

About what? You serious? You don't know. Everybody knows you never go full retarded. What do you mean? You went full retard, man. Never go full retard.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. It gets it gets better.

So then he goes on to say in another part of the article, two income households aren't vastly more common than they used to be because of a brutal Malthusian competition for increasingly scarce resources. So basically he's arguing against the idea that, you know, as women entered the labor market, it decreased wages for everyone.

And, and now because of that, we need two income families to work. So then he goes on to say. Basically, instead, women work because their [00:06:00] wages are so much higher than they used to be. There isn't a two income trap. There's an expanded females economic opportunity trap. And that opportunity cost is what is contributing to the mightily to the decrease in fertility.

So I, I'm like our listeners, you're smart people. Can you immediately see the idiocy of this idea? That what he is suggesting that we do, so I will maybe break this down and it wasn't obvious to you what he is suggesting that we do, he is saying that individuals now as married couples, both people have so much economic opportunity.

That there is no reason to have kids, like the competing things against having kids now are just so much bigger, like all of the things you can do in the world, whether it's the internet or travel or everything like that, and all the economic opportunities. So what we need to do is remove economic opportunities from [00:07:00] people.

Now, in a way, he's right. If you could enforce this policy fairly without the very obvious unintended side e