Why "Socially Conservative" Nations Are Having Fewer Kids (Yes Really) With Aria Babu

In this insightful discussion with rising conservative thinker Aria Babu, we analyze counterintuitive social trends around fertility rates. We explain why more “socially conservative” countries often have lower fertility than socially liberal ones.

Aria contends intensive mothering expectations in traditional cultures create barriers. Malcolm notes conservative minority groups within secular societies have higher birth rates. We argue familial living stands crucial, not public policy concessions. Still, promoting extensive stay-at-home motherhood proves misguided, despite intuitions. Overall an incisive look at the data on real drivers of birth rates.

Aria Babu: [00:00:00] My theory for it is that British elites have three beliefs that are very difficult to square with each other, which is one of them, which is that biodeterminism is completely false. That a child's outcomes are based wholly on on their environment.

Second, the inequality is bad. So the fact that children from different. Households have different outcomes is genuinely negative. It's like a genuine, like really bad thing to happen. And three, the education can basically fix all of all of these ends. So then when you see that children who go to the same schools end up having different outcomes based on their parents backgrounds, the best theory that then comes to mind is, oh, it's about what's going on slightly before school, which I think is why so much energy is poured into the early years foundation stage.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello! It is so exciting to be with you guys today. I am really excited to bring... Someone who I feel we, we have scouted in, in, in talent scouting, but it seems that all of the other rising conservative intellectuals also know her Aria [00:01:00] Babu who is sort of a underground key figure in the, the conservative intellectual movement in the UK.

And she recently started a sub stack. She's only one episode in, but I already love it. I was actually planning to do an episode just on. chain of subtext that she's releasing. So do you want to start by going into the subtext that you're working on the, the, the first episode, and then we can expand from

Aria Babu: there.

Yeah, of course. So my first piece was about how socially conservative countries. don't seem to have higher birth rates in socially liberal countries. So the first, like, look at the data, if you just look at the European value survey, and you compare that to just TFRs across these countries, shows that actually the more like socially conservative countries, so we're looking at thinking like Italy and Spain, for example, have lower birth rates than the more socially liberal ones.

We're thinking Scandinavian countries, France, Britain. My second post which I've already done the research for, but I haven't published yet, then goes into [00:02:00] asking why that might be the case. So my first theory is that maybe more socially liberal countries have better provision of childcare. They have more public services that support motherhood.

So I looked at cost of childcare, number of parents who use it, and Yeah, both of those things, basically, and also attitudes towards using child care. And it seems that those also have like literally no correlation with birth rates in different countries. And I remember seeing that in Austria the cost of a nursery place for two kids costs 3 percent of the average woman's income, whereas in Switzerland, it costs 64 percent and those countries have the exact same birth rate.

Fascinating. So that doesn't seem to make a difference. And I was like, okay, what is another reason why a more socially liberal country might have A higher birth rate. Well, maybe it's because a more socially liberal country. Well, I was going to say maybe it's just because it's a nicer place to live, but that's actually like super unmeasurable.

I mean, maybe it is a nicer place to live and that does make it easier, but that kind of sounds like b******t to me. sO then I thought, okay, [00:03:00] what are the other correlates that might have you have might have between social conservatism and yes, And I was wondering if maybe it's because the more you value motherhood, the more you prize it, the more work it might be for people.

So it's very difficult to then try and pick out data that suggests like how much work do you think children are? But the closest I could find on the OECD stats site is birth rates as correlated with the amount of time that mothers spend with new babies. Okay. Okay. And then you do get the correlation.

Then you get the correlation that pretty much maps to the socially conservative to socially liberal correlation. So that's my underlying theory currently, which is that the more socially conservative people also believe that having children is much more work.

Simone Collins: And so just to be clear, more socially conservative nations also report higher amounts of time spent with new babies.

And is this in the form of maternity leave or is there some other measure of time spent?

Aria Babu: So the stat I looked at was just number of hours. That they spend so they do like hours a day doing childcare. [00:04:00] So the OECD does classic polling, which is how many hours do you spend in work? How many hours do you spend in leisure?

How many hours do you spend in child in household labor in general? And then, so then they looked at new mothers of newborn women.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this would also correlate with something that is really clear in the data was his East Asian countries. If you control for income have unusually low fertility rates and generally the more conservative in East Asian country is the lower its fertility rate is going to be.

And something we keep hammering home on this show when we bring up the East Asian sphere because it's something that I think goes against a lot of Westerners intuition is that East Asian countries are more socially conservative than Western countries by a pretty dramatic amount. And so this would also explain why those countries have such low fertility rates.

Which, this has a lot of really interesting implications of what you're finding. [00:05:00] So the first is something that, you know, progressives don't want to hear. Which is that it turns out that you're not actually helping by subsidizing child care. That does not appear to matter. But then the second is, and this is a deleterious thing, I keep seeing conservative influencers, even ones who think of themselves as pronatalist advocating, which is the stay at home mom lifestyle.

And what we are seeing here is Almost nothing other than wealth negatively impacts fertility as much as the expectation of the stay at home mother lifestyle among mothers. And there's two really interesting points we can take away from this. One, and we often point this out, there's a great, the Nobel Prize winner this year did a thing on this and I'm going to see if I can find the the

graph and put it on the screen, but it shows that over time Women, like, like we, we think that women now are.

employed in the workforce at higher rates than they were historically, which is [00:06:00] true. They are employed now at the workforce at higher rates than they were like in the 50s. But if you go back before that increasingly you see higher and higher rates of women participation in the workforce. And what we really had was just a slump of women, female participation in the workforce when jobs began to take people out of the home.

So, what we're actually seeing when people are modeling these stay at home wife scenarios is they think they are modeling a traditional lifestyle when they really are not modeling a traditional lifestyle. They'r