Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…Keep in mind though, before the pandemic, the US was above replacement rate. It doesn’t seem so utopian to think we could get back to 2.2, 2.3. I have two contrasting views here. On the one hand, I am of the view that it seems likely that as societies shrink, they will figure out a cultural answer paired with policy answers, so people can actually have the lives that they say they want to have, which is lives where they marry and have two or three kids. I think the evidence is pretty good that the pressure there has to be on marrying younger. You’ve probably seen the charts that have been going around — I think from the FT — but basically if people were marrying younger . . . The difference here is really about whether or not you get married. The piece of leverage is on marriage. People are much more unlikely, correctly, to have children outside the context of a highly committed, stable relationship. It’s very, very hard to have children as a single parent. People do it, obviously, but that’s going to be one of the main ingredients of fertility falling, because it’s just an incredibly, incredibly difficult thing to do. So, there’s that. It seems to me that you should be able to, practically, if you begin to reorient the cultural and policy machine of society, to bring up the birth rate by 0.4. That can’t be that hard. Then you ask yourself, “Why doesn’t anybody seem able to do it? ” To the extent I’m pessimistic about both the ability to control use policy here and pessimistic about the ability of culture to act in an organized fashion — people have chosen to change the culture and the culture had a downstream change — is because I think that some of the societies in Asia and other places that have entered into a very rapid shrinkage and have treated it as a problem, one of them would have figured something out by now. Now, maybe it just hasn’t been long enough and South Korea is going to execute an amazing turnaround on this, but what I’m observing in South Korea, and frankly what I feel like I’m observing even a little bit in America, is that gender relations worsen as this happens, right? I agree.…

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