Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…She was saying towards the end, as Bari was pushing her on solutions, because she’s making some points. She’s thinking about the sexual relationships between men and women in this podcast, more than birth rates. She’s saying things like birth control, at least the pill — it’s not that it should be banned. It should only be available for married women, that it is good for married women to be able to space out children, but we should not take so much of the weight and the stakes, and the incentive to marry off of the singles dating market. Now, it’s obviously not my view, but I think it gets to what I don’t think is going to work in the view you’re describing here, which is, when society and technology have changed so much, when you have things like the pill, when you have the opportunities we now have for people to live lives of real expressionism, of building their identity around work, which we train people to do from a very early age, I don’t know that there is a way to insert an ethic, a cultural application of shaming or re-moralization around this that will substantially change behavior. If there was, I think some society already would’ve done it effectively. Now, Ross, and the societies I think we would talk about here — that’s coming from religion. It’s not coming from just cultural conservatism; it’s coming from religion. Religion is very, very, very powerful, but I don’t know how we re-religionize people. Getting people to actually believe is different than telling them, in an abstract way, that birth outcomes are better and society is more cohesive in Utah, where the influence of the Church of Latter-day Saints is still very strong. I actually think this idea, that we should just move back to a more shaming cultural conservatism, has functionally all the same problems of the idea, which is we should just have more pronatal policy. It just doesn’t appear to work. Lots of places try it and it doesn’t work. Hungary is not a huge birth success story right now, nor is Russia. There are places that still have more of this view or have tried to reinsert it, and it didn’t work. Israel is a little bit of a more interesting case from this perspective, but when you are there . . . People do, to some degree, what they see around them, and the influence of the Haredi families, of the ultra-orthodox families, which are huge, is everywhere. I was just in Israel, not just now, but back in June, and there was obviously a lot happening that you could notice, but you really could feel the difference of being in a high-fertility society there. I’d had this interaction with somebody at Prospect Park before I had gone to Israel, and he had four kids with him. We had just been chatting, and I must’ve said something that made him think a little bit like I was asking, “What are you doing here with four kids?” I’d asked if they were all his because they looked different. I thought it might be a group of kids. He’s like,” Oh, yes, but . . ittle bit like I was asking, “What are you doing here with four kids?” I’d asked if they were all his because they looked different. I thought it might be a group of kids. He’s like,” Oh, yes, but . . .” He was explaining it away. He was like, “We’d only meant to have three and then we had twins.” In Israel, nobody’s explaining away why they have four kids. Tons of people have four kids, tons of people have six kids, tons of people have eight kids. You have a society there that there is an anchor weight of just what is normal being placed by the fact that there is still a huge conservative religious community. But just doing the thing I think JD Vance was trying to do when he was scolding childless cat ladies — that doesn’t appear to work. But at the macro level, it can work if enough things change over enough time. Keep in mind, if this doesn’t happen culturally, it will happen through replacement. It happens one way or the other.…

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