Diabolical Lies - Who Wants Kids？

00:00:00.680 Today's episode of Diabolicalize is brought to you by the first episode outline I wrote about this topic, the second episode outline I wrote about this topic, the third outline I wrote and then abandoned halfway through, and the two-hour sob session I put you, Katie, through on Friday, which was technically meant to be our podcast recording and rapidly devolved into me unloading all of my anxieties to you.

00:00:22.300 I'm so happy to be here. Thank you.

00:00:23.820 Again. So, Katie, today we are going to talk about pronatalism in America and something that

00:00:31.320 is concerning me more broadly, which is how we talk about family and children in America.

00:00:36.620 I'm concerned by how the right talks about family and children, of course,

00:00:40.940 but I also am pretty concerned about how the center left and the farther left

00:00:44.920 talks about family and children.

00:00:46.160 So this is Caro's Why I Left the Left Pipeline episode.

00:00:50.320 Yeah, exactly. I'm about to become a Republican.

00:00:52.040 She's building the foundation for her large-scale grift coup.

00:00:57.620 Oh, my God. You're welcome, Katie. I'm going to make you rich.

00:01:00.360 You can say you're a victim.

00:01:02.000 So, I don't want to talk about the birthright panic for too long.

00:01:05.120 We covered this a little bit in our Republicans Are Going to Impregnate You episode,

00:01:08.660 which I re-listened to, Katie, and we were such babies then.

00:01:11.460 It's only been a few months, but that was, like, so early in our podcasting together,

00:01:16.840 which is kind of funny.

00:01:17.580 I refuse to listen back to our earlier episodes because I know they'll make me want to die.

00:01:23.000 They gave me a lot of editing anxiety, but I think that you and I are still

00:01:27.240 pretty unconcerned about the birth rate, right? Would you say that that's true for you as well?

00:01:32.040 Oh, yeah, definitely.

00:01:33.280 So just some kind of like stats for people to have, you know, an understanding about what we

00:01:36.940 talk about when we talk about the birth rate panic. So the U.S. birth rate is well below

00:01:41.520 replacement rate. And when people talk about these rates, they're talking about, on average,

00:01:45.560 the number of children that a woman has. So for example, right now we are averaging 1.8 children

00:01:50.920 born per adult woman in America. That is compared to the 2.2 that you need for replacement. This is

00:01:57.300 not just happening in the U.S. This is taking place in pretty much every developed nation on

00:02:01.600 earth. I did a lot of research into this for one of the earlier episode outlines I have planned.

00:02:06.760 So many fucking versions of this conversation. And so if anyone ever wants to do a deep dive on 0.81

00:02:11.400 like the population boom in Africa, I'm your girl. But basically, all you need to know is

00:02:16.600 Latin America, Europe, Scandinavian countries, North America, all of these continents basically

00:02:22.740 except for Africa are experiencing a drop in the birth rate. And in some instances in the U.S.,

00:02:29.020 that's kind of a drop that people disagree over how impactful it is. In other countries like South

00:02:34.640 Korea and Japan, where the birth rate is much lower, pretty much everyone is concerned. And so

00:02:39.580 I think to a certain extent, this worry about the birth rate panic isn't inherently ideological. I

00:02:45.320 think that the more it drops, the more that you will see bipartisan concern. But right now, I think

00:02:50.140 a lot of academics would agree that, like, we're kind of in a gray area as a country. Does that

00:02:54.660 make sense, Katie? It does. And I think right now in the U.S., it's ideological. I think once it

00:03:00.740 becomes 0.5 kids per adult woman, then it starts to get existential. Yeah. And that's when you 0.59

00:03:08.260 start to get into questions of like, so do we want our country to exist in a hundred years?

00:03:14.000 Yeah, completely. Another thing that I just want to note quickly is that when you were talking

00:03:19.260 about birth rates, there are just a bevy of contradictions. Totally. You really can't get

00:03:24.620 a good understanding about this through one stat. And so I would encourage you, if you ever read a

00:03:29.700 link, it's not that the stat you're reading isn't true, but it's that pretty much everything is

00:03:34.480 layered, there's a yes and quality to all of this. So for example, generally speaking, people

00:03:40.440 believe that birth rates have gone down to some correlation with women's suffrage, but the birth

00:03:45.320 rate is also dropping dramatically in countries like Saudi Arabia, where you haven't seen much

00:03:49.180 of women's suffrage. Generally, people associate higher birth rates with poverty, but there are

00:03:53.640 some complicated data sets related to wealthy women giving birth to more kids in America.

00:03:58.880 Katie, didn't you look into some data showing that wealthy educated women are actually having

00:04:02.480 the most kids right now? Yeah, this was a really interesting data set to me because I had started

00:04:08.880 to notice kind of a cultural shift in the way that big families were being presented in media.

00:04:13.960 And when I was growing up, I tended to think of the very, very big family as being correlated

00:04:21.300 with like religiosity or in some cases being low income. And the weird thing about the trend in the

00:04:30.680 United States is that in the 2000s, in the, I don't know, like probably 2000, I think it was

00:04:36.360 like between 2005 and 2010, there was a flip where the trend that you observe globally, where as

00:04:43.320 years of education rise, average number of children per woman goes down. In the U.S. it flipped. And

00:04:50.280 now as of 2023, the group for whom the birth rate is the highest are women with graduate and

00:04:58.400 professional degrees. So the highest educational attainment in this data set are the women that

00:05:04.500 are having the most kids, which to me sent me down the path of, oh, so maybe this is related

00:05:11.520 to income inequality. There's also some work that was done by an economist, Claudia Golden.

00:05:16.480 She has a really interesting theory that this birth rate drop is kind of directly correlated

00:05:19.980 to something we talked about in an earlier episode with what Betsy Stevenson and Justin

00:05:24.760 Wolfers did, like the paradox of declining female happiness. This idea that in countries where there

00:05:30.560 is the strongest tension between the speed at which women gain suffrage and like how quickly

00:05:35.900 men were able to adjust to this new reality, that's kind of where you can see that tension.

00:05:40.720 I would also add to that, for Claudia's research, it wasn't, to my mind, only about

00:05:47.460 suffrage. It was also about how quickly those countries industrialized.

00:05:52.260 Yes, thank you.

00:05:52.800 And how quickly they adopted capitalist economies.

00:05:56.560 Right.

00:05:56.820 And that adoption and that women's ability to participate, if that happened really fast, like in South Korea, that the cultural attitudes around a woman's role didn't necessarily have time to evolve.

00:06:11.940 Whereas, like, in the United States, she points out, that process actually happened kind of slowly.

00:06:17.140 And so you haven't seen as big of a mismatch.

00:06:19.840 the culture and the economy are, like, a little more in lockstep in the U.S. than in a place like

00:06:24.480 South Korea. Right. Thank you. This is why I keep you around. So, similar to the birth rate panic, 0.91

00:06:29.860 the conversation around who's having children and what they want and why and, like, what families

00:06:34.960 look like in America is also kind of, you know, a bevy of contradictions. One example I would give

00:06:40.480 is that I actually had to take a lot of time to figure out how many people are having kids.

00:06:45.980 We talk all the time about how the rate of childlessness is going up, but I was like, well, what is the rate of childlessness?

00:06:53.260 I read this Pew Research survey that showed that something like 40% of 18 to 50-year-olds do not currently have children and don't plan to have children.

00:07:02.740 40% is a crazy high number, and someone might conclude from that, like, oh my god, okay, so 60% of Americans are going to be parents.

00:07:09.940 But that's not true, because a vast majority of people, especially between the ages of 18 to 35, change their mind.

00:07:15.980 And so it indicates a rising sentiment that has continued to grow, but what I could find is that the vast majority of adults in America do become parents, okay?

00:07:26.580 Something like 80 to 90 percent as of the 2000s, and they think that that number is going to drop to around three in four adults will have children.

00:07:33.920 So it would drop to 75 percent or 70 percent.

00:07:36.660 So one other piece of data that I think is interesting here in that theme of contradictions is that when I was writing an essay about the large American family becoming a status symbol now, I dug into the census data. So I basically downloaded data sets from like the 70s, the 80s, the 90s today.

00:07:55.140 It's good for you to have those because they're going to purge those from the archives soon, probably. Keep those on a hard drive, baby.

00:08:01.380 No, they're going to keep these because they're going to be like, look at how many more kids you bitches used to have. 1.00

00:08:06.660 So I looked into that to try to figure out, based on income distribution, how has the rate of children changed? 1.00

00:08:14.300 And it has fallen for everybody, but it fell the most for low-income and middle-income people.

00:08:21.380 Upper-income people still make very similar choices, which to me is kind of an important factoid to keep in our back pockets here,

00:08:28.780 because it indicates what are the decisions that you make when you basically have the fewest

00:08:34.800 constraints on the decisions that are, like, within your control, basically.

00:08:40.480 That's fascinating. That's super interesting. So, yeah, we could spend a whole episode talking

00:08:44.140 about all these contradictions. In fact, we have.

00:08:46.260 We did! We have.

00:08:48.420 We'll release that two-hour back and forth as a bonus.

00:08:51.340 I have spent dozens of hours of my life at this point having conversations with myself. 0.99

00:08:56.080 God bless Katie and God bless my husband for the past two weeks because I have been a fucking 1.00

00:09:00.600 basket case. But today, this version of the outline, we'll see if this is the one we release, 0.97

00:09:05.120 I'm much less interested in the actual numbers of the birth rate crisis. And I'm much more

00:09:09.060 interested in talking to you about the messaging taking place right now in the context of that

00:09:13.280 landscape about families and babies and what the role of society is in reinforcing these systems,

00:09:18.960 what the role of women is in these systems, and where we go from here. Something I learned in this 0.74

00:09:24.920 research that I went down is that, Katie, what percentage of American voters do you think are

00:09:30.200 progressive? Four. So the very generous estimate that they give is between seven and 10 percent.

00:09:39.680 Oh, damn. And that is people who define as, quote, very liberal. So they might not even be 0.98

00:09:43.980 progressive. Shit knows they're not Marxist. So something I was thinking about a lot in this 0.99

00:09:48.140 conversation that I want us to kind of understand as I'm moving through is it's very important to

00:09:52.500 think about how you talk about things. And I would say that most progressive actually want

00:09:56.420 to see the changes that we talk about being made. And so it's very important to think about how you

00:10:01.180 talk about things and to think about how you are growing a movement. And that is something that I

00:10:05.860 want to ground us in because sometimes you and I will very happily have very abstract conversations

00:10:09.860 and I'm happy about those too. But the majority of this conversation is not blue sky ideation.

00:10:14.360 This is what are we doing right now and how do we respond to this administration in a way that

00:10:19.600 helps people. Katie, what do you think when you hear the word pronatalism?

00:10:25.680 Like Handmaid's Tale.

00:10:27.840 Okay, say more.

00:10:29.300 Well, I think about it as a very prescriptive movement. It's making a prescriptive suggestion

00:10:35.680 about how a woman in particular should use her body, her time, her life. I bristle at that. I

00:10:44.360 think i associate it often with far-right ideology with traditional gender roles with things that i

00:10:52.600 like generally find uncompelling so yeah not great not a fan cool so pro-natalism if you want to get

00:11:04.460 into like the literal definition essentially just refers to any public policy that is explicitly

00:11:08.800 aimed at helping people have more kids. So it can and frequently is tied to white supremacist or

00:11:14.760 colonial efforts. And in America, where we have a very short history that is also just like very

00:11:20.240 defined by white supremacy and colonialism, our history is pretty much defined by far-right

00:11:25.320 pronatalists. But pronatalism is just as frequently tied to more socialist efforts. Like Scandinavian

00:11:30.980 countries are considered the most pronatalist. It's obviously in a very different way than us,

00:11:36.040 But they will use that term pretty comfortably in referencing universal health care, paid parental leave, all of these policies that are explicitly about families and making families more comfortable having more kids, encouraging parents to enjoy having a kid.

00:11:51.020 And something I've been thinking about is that the term pronatalism is actually very similar to the term feminism, where there is so much cultural baggage to it.

00:12:00.320 But the term itself is actually so much more broad than people, I think, understand. 0.69

00:12:06.500 Can I ask a dumb question? 0.98

00:12:08.260 Yeah, no dumb questions. 0.99

00:12:09.620 Why does the government want people to have more kids? 0.99

00:12:13.420 Why is that something they're trying to incentivize? 0.99

00:12:16.000 A government wants kids because a government wants people. 1.00

00:12:18.500 A government doesn't exist if there aren't people.

00:12:21.020 And a government also wants stability.

00:12:22.720 So in the same way that governments want children, they also sometimes don't want children.

00:12:26.840 So you'll see governments take on antinatalist policies, too.

00:12:29.340 You see that with China, with the one-child policy.

00:12:31.860 In the 70s, a book called The Population Bomb came out in America, and it was a huge deal, and it inspired a big wave of antinatalism.

00:12:40.500 And so these terms are very loaded for reasons that we will deconstruct, but they also are incredibly broad.

00:12:46.140 Like, every monotheistic religion in existence is pronatalist if you're a Christian.

00:12:50.520 if you are Jewish, if you are Muslim, you are a part of a pro-natalist society. Any organized 0.87

00:12:56.160 group of people is going to show pro-natalist inclinations unless the birthright gets too big,

00:13:00.540 and then they're going to be anti-natalist. We are constantly trying to manage and titrate

00:13:06.460 a population size, and you see that all throughout human history. This term is

00:13:11.200 understandably loaded. So let's start with how the Trump administration and the new right is

00:13:16.540 talking about pronatalism. Katie, have you been kind of watching this play out in the far right

00:13:21.920 over the last few months? Yeah, yeah, you know, definitely. How does it make you feel?

00:13:27.760 Like a cow. Yeah, I feel like I've seen some totally good faith and not at all concerning

00:13:35.000 rhetoric coming out of the far right. Katie, in our next bullet point, I ask you to summarize

00:13:39.700 their fear about the birthright crisis in good or bad faith. I get to pick. You can pick.

00:13:46.540 More white babies! We need more white babies, and we're going to deport the brown citizens. 1.00

00:13:54.900 Yeah, you're not wrong. So, Elon Musk has said repeatedly that he thinks that the birth rate 1.00

00:14:00.260 drop is humanity's greatest risk. He thinks we're going to go extinct. He's very big,

00:14:04.640 of course, on Great Replacement Theory, which is the theory that Western civilization 1.00

00:14:08.280 is at risk because of rising immigrant populations. 1.00

00:14:11.860 Also, Elon Musk has been on about this for a long time. He's been talking about this for, 1.00

00:14:15.680 like a really long time. I was going to say, J.D. Vance has also been talking about this for a long

00:14:21.540 time. So give Daddy Peter Thiel credit where credit is due. Like this is not something that

00:14:26.600 is new to them. This is very much something we've been talking for a while. So Katie, I want you to

00:14:31.400 read a quote from J.D. Vance in 2019 when he was a mere like 34 years old. So successful at such a

00:14:39.260 young age. Our people aren't having enough children to replace themselves. That should

00:14:45.200 bother us. We want babies not just because they are economically useful. We want more babies

00:14:52.420 because children are good, and we believe children are good because we are not sociopaths.

00:14:58.920 Thoughts? I mean, on its face, it's like kind of, I don't want to say like hard to disagree with,

00:15:05.460 But I feel kind of dumb being like, actually, J.D., children are shit. 1.00

00:15:10.180 J.D. Vance is, he's kind of like the Tim Walls of the right. 1.00

00:15:13.260 He's very good at insulting the left in such a manner and being like, well, we want this because we're not crazy.

00:15:17.980 In the same way that Tim Walls called them weird until the Kamala Harris campaign roped him in and was like, no, Tim, we have a great plan.

00:15:25.360 We're going to figure out another way to win this presidency. 0.86

00:15:27.200 Beyonce's on her way.

00:15:28.560 Don't go on any podcasts.

00:15:30.080 Don't do that really good thing you do about talking to Americans about having a better life.

00:15:35.520 That thing that you're doing that's working? Stop.

00:15:37.720 Stop.

00:15:40.300 Okay, so I do want to pause because Vance is deploying two very common conservative arguments here.

00:15:47.220 The first is that we need to maintain the replacement rate, you know, very loaded, very far right.

00:15:51.940 But the second is a more broad idea that I think a lot of centrists agree with, which is that babies are good.

00:15:57.220 Children are good.

00:15:58.020 the idea that children are a net good in society and that you should want a society to have

00:16:02.880 children. So then, of course, we have Vance's famous quote, the childless cat lady's quote.

00:16:07.040 Have you ever read it in full? I have. He's more so getting at the idea that because, oh, oh, oh,

00:16:12.800 it's, he's talking about the fact that, like, we have, like, gay men like Pete Buttigieg.

00:16:18.280 This isn't that big of a deal. Don't worry. No, no. I know it. You do know it. You're getting

00:16:24.560 it right. Give me the floor. Uh, even though Pete Buttigieg has children and like AOC, right? That

00:16:30.780 because these like prominent liberal voices don't have kids, he says they don't have a stake in the

00:16:37.500 future of America. And so you can't trust them to create policy for the future because they don't

00:16:43.820 have a stake in the future. That's completely correct. He said that our country is run by

00:16:47.640 quote, a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices 1.00

00:16:52.060 that they've made, and so they want the rest of the country miserable too. And then you're 1.00

00:16:55.800 absolutely correct. He called out Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and AOC, who he described as the

00:17:01.020 future of the Democrats. We should be so fucking lucky. And then he brought us to the trademark 0.98

00:17:06.280 really good idea he had to give parents more votes than non-parents because he is a king of

00:17:11.440 subtlety. So, Katie, spoiler alert, do not listen to this if you haven't yet watched the season

00:17:17.420 finale of America, but Donald Trump did win the 2024 election. And he has moved very quickly on

00:17:24.160 pronatalist policies. He even announced that he wants to be the fertilization president. Did you

00:17:28.540 hear that? My pussy has never been drier. Well, they are not worried about women being wet. 1.00

00:17:36.980 Do you remember Ben Shapiro? Wait, oh my God. He's like, it's gay if your wife orgasms.

00:17:43.980 I mean, Andrew Tate thinks that you are gay if you don't come within six seconds of being inside of a woman. 1.00

00:17:49.540 So this is what we're dealing with. 0.99

00:17:50.640 These guys cannot stop projecting.

00:17:52.620 No, they sure can't.

00:17:53.920 So, okay.

00:17:55.380 Donald Trump passed an executive order in February demanding that the assistant to the president for domestic policy figure out a plan and deliver it to him within 90 days on how to expand IVF access and reduce out-of-pocket expenses.

00:18:08.140 This is a great policy.

00:18:09.720 Maybe nothing will come of it, but we are still within that 90-day period.

00:18:13.220 I would love to see them have a plan to help people give birth.

00:18:16.560 And I wouldn't be surprised because something that I learned while I was deep diving into pronatalism

00:18:20.980 and like the Austin convention that we like don't even have time to talk about, but I'll link to.

00:18:25.260 There is not consensus with all of the pronatalists who are on the right.

00:18:30.820 They all have a shared goal.

00:18:32.100 And so they work together.

00:18:33.220 But these are very, very different factions.

00:18:35.960 There are groups of people who want to increase accidental births, Katie.

00:18:40.020 You and I both know that one of the reasons the birth rate has gone down is because teenagers are not giving birth as much anymore.

00:18:45.960 There are politicians who want to make it easier for teenagers to give birth.

00:18:48.740 There are also a lot of centrist Republicans who actually really just want to increase intentional births.

00:18:54.680 So they want to make it much easier for a family who has three kids to maybe have five.

00:18:59.300 They want to make it easier for women in their late 30 years to give birth.

00:19:02.760 And so it all does get caught up in this weird soup, but they do have very different approaches.

00:19:08.320 And it is worth, if anyone wants to do a deep dive, it's pretty fascinating.

00:19:11.040 Moving forward, we have another memo that instructed the Department of Transportation to preferentially direct grants and services towards communities with high marriage and birth rates.

00:19:21.820 We have another executive order in which Trump said he wants to dismantle the Department of Education.

00:19:27.420 I don't know if people are immediately connecting this to family, but it is very much designed to give conservative families, traditional families, more freedom in choosing what they do with their children.

00:19:37.060 And then we have this round of policies that were revealed in a New York Times piece that has gone stratospherically viral. Katie, I'm going to have you read this section.

00:19:45.140 One proposal shared with aides would reserve 30% of scholarships for the Fulbright Program, the prestigious government-backed international fellowship for applicants who are married or have children. Another would give a $5,000 cash baby bonus to every American mother after delivery. A third calls on the government to find programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles, in part so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive.

00:20:09.340 Katie, any thoughts?

00:20:10.280 uh yeah i mean this is sort of how i feel about like the ivf thing where i'm like

00:20:16.520 you are never gonna catch me being like no don't send direct payments to families right i'm like

00:20:23.440 that is perfectly in line with my politics however it does feel a little bit like you're like

00:20:29.900 using like a squirt gun on a house fire yeah i agree with that i have a note about the baby bonus 0.67

00:20:35.620 But I also want to say, with the Fulbright, this is maybe just my little fucked up brain, but if they were going to do a Fulbright that prioritized family, there is a strong chance that it's going to be the Trump administration's understanding of family, which is man-woman. 0.52

00:20:48.720 And I was thinking that this could set up for the Trump administration an incredible Supreme Court case to overturn Obergefell, because they are always thinking about stuff like that, about creating legislative opportunities for someone to sue them and for them to take it to the Supreme Court.

00:21:04.920 So, Katie, your response to this is pretty much consistent with the response that we've seen from Democrats, not just progressive, but Democrats.

00:21:12.440 It's two-part. 1.00

00:21:13.280 Number one, fuck you. 1.00

00:21:15.600 Don't give us a baby bonus. 1.00

00:21:17.040 Give us health care.

00:21:17.740 Give us a social safety net.

00:21:18.860 Make daycare costs and access more affordable.

00:21:21.320 And number two, why are you slashing all these programs and research initiatives if you want more kids?

00:21:25.940 So let's talk about that one first.

00:21:28.120 That is a very fair question, but it misunderstands how Republicans think about having kids.

00:21:33.600 Republicans view this largely as a cultural problem.

00:21:36.280 They are not worried about slashing funds.

00:21:38.720 The majority of the initiatives that they are talking about are culturally based.

00:21:42.880 It's about, like, encouraging traditional families.

00:21:44.960 They have this idea of a medal of motherhood.

00:21:47.320 They are very focused on culture, and they are very unconcerned with economic incentives.

00:21:52.500 And they're actually very convinced that economic incentives are not the way for people to have kids. 0.98

00:21:59.060 So you might ask, if they only care about culture, what the fuck is this weird little baby bonus? 0.91

00:22:04.460 I actually think that they were planning on including that because they thought that it would make Democrats happy. 0.96

00:22:10.340 Do you know why they thought it would make Democrats happy, Katie?

00:22:13.320 I don't know, probably because Democrats have been saying they want that.

00:22:16.000 That's all Democrats offer us. 0.98

00:22:17.980 Katie, can you read the headline of this article from this fucking August? 0.97

00:22:24.300 Why Harris's proposed baby bonus just might work. 0.98

00:22:28.900 Yeah, that's pretty damning.

00:22:30.080 That's kind of embarrassing.

00:22:31.700 If you want to have a good time, do the Google Times search. 0.95

00:22:35.840 Take it from before January and search Democrat baby bonus and see how fucking bullish they are on a baby bonus. 1.00

00:22:42.860 People believe that Kamala Harris got this idea from an initiative that has been taking place in Flint, Michigan. 0.58

00:22:47.380 Katie, do you know Flint?

00:22:48.700 Oh, yeah.

00:22:49.000 They still don't have clean water, right?

00:22:50.800 Exactly.

00:22:51.160 So Flint, Michigan has been piloting like this actually pretty incredible initiative, which is basically it has been like pulled together by all of these city organizers getting private donations, public donations, getting the support of Gretchen Whitmer to give $6,000, no strings attached to children.

00:23:08.900 The argument that they made for this is that this is basically the equivalent of three months maternity leave for someone who is earning $10 an hour.

00:23:15.620 So with 1,000 families, this was a pilot initiative,

00:23:18.280 they gave them $1,500 at 20 weeks gestation, so pre-birth,

00:23:22.020 and then they gave them $500 a month for the entire year after birth.

00:23:25.980 The stories of what has come of this initiative are pretty breathtaking.

00:23:30.480 You have women moving out of abusive homes.

00:23:32.640 You have people avoiding eviction.

00:23:34.200 You're creating all these touch points between local organizers and citizens.

00:23:38.140 And so you're seeing higher signups for prenatal care,

00:23:41.100 higher signups for education programs,

00:23:42.780 not really because of the money, but merely because you're increasing the number of these

00:23:46.440 interactions. So I'm not saying I'm bullish on a baby bonus as a solve for capitalism,

00:23:50.880 but I am saying that Democrats have never offered us universal health care to begin with.

00:23:55.000 They were very big on this baby bonus. And I also want to note in 2021, the Biden administration

00:24:00.880 did its own version of a baby bonus where they increased the child tax credit from $2,000 to

00:24:05.380 $3,600 for children under six. They increased it to $3,000 for children from six to 17.

00:24:10.620 and in one year, the child poverty rate was halved. 0.99

00:24:14.800 When the dumb fucks in Congress let that credit expire, 1.00

00:24:17.960 the child poverty rate spiked again immediately. 1.00

00:24:20.320 Oh yeah, I mean, and definitionally so

00:24:23.120 because the poverty rate is calculated

00:24:26.160 by, you know, a certain level of income.

00:24:29.100 So if you increase their income above the poverty rate,

00:24:32.120 it's pretty statistically straightforward.

00:24:34.560 But I also think that there's like a deeper story there

00:24:37.840 of the fact that poverty is just the condition of not having enough money.

00:24:42.060 Yeah, completely.

00:24:42.540 So if you just give people money, it's pretty amazing how quickly they can start to turn

00:24:49.120 their situations around.

00:24:51.280 A baby bonus is a good thing, but I think that we are so understandably furious about

00:24:56.620 this administration that we don't want to give them any sort of perceived win, which

00:25:00.680 I do understand.

00:25:01.620 I think that's definitely at the heart of it.

00:25:04.260 Yeah. 0.98

00:25:04.420 So we know that the far right is largely evil and white supremacist. 0.96

00:25:10.220 So now we're going to move. 0.99

00:25:12.440 Check.

00:25:13.360 The next section of the outline is where we talk about that we are too.

00:25:19.000 No, I honestly like that's that's what we're talking about with the Trump administration.

00:25:22.360 People are covering this.

00:25:23.360 It's worth covering. 1.00

00:25:24.380 You shouldn't trust them for a fucking second. 0.98

00:25:26.280 And other people are doing a good job covering this. 0.99

00:25:28.720 And I want to go to other places now.

00:25:30.100 So, Katie, the argument about the social safety net doesn't really hold water as much as Democrats would like for it to hold water.

00:25:37.220 Can you explain that a little bit more to me?

00:25:38.380 Yes. The basics of this argument are that even in countries where you have the most robust social safety nets, the birth rate is still dropping. So it makes sense to think about these things as things that we should still do because human beings matter and their lives matter and we should be supporting them.

00:26:03.540 But that if we are doing them with the expectation that, like, there's going to be some big baby boom, we're probably going to be disappointed because we know that producing that social safety net often does not create, like, markedly different family formation decisions.

00:26:20.400 Right. So just to give people some numbers, in Norway, where parents receive a 49-week fully paid parental leave policy, the birth rate is 1.41 right now.

00:26:31.720 In Finland, which is one of the lowest maternal mortality rates on the planet, meaning it is one of the safest places to give birth, the birth rate is 1.3.

00:26:39.780 In Sweden, where parents can take up to 120 days a year to care for a sick child, the birth rate is 1.5.

00:26:46.580 And in Denmark, where IVF is essentially free, the birth rate is also 1.5. 0.99

00:26:51.480 And let me tell you, these governments are fucking panicked. 0.99

00:26:55.960 They are deeply pronatalist. 0.99

00:26:57.780 They are deeply worried about the birth rate.

00:26:59.560 They want their citizens to have kids, and they are working, I would say, in pretty good-faith ways to keep trying to make it easier for people to have kids.

00:27:07.560 So, Katie, there was a great article from a European website that is covering the panic in Denmark about this.

00:27:14.140 So I want us to read a few sections from it. I'm going to share this with you.

00:27:16.980 Sophie Mickelson lives in Copenhagen with her partner.

00:27:20.000 Despite being in a committed relationship, the couple is unsure if they want to become parents.

00:27:24.700 Mickelson, 28, pointed to studies showing that overall happiness decreases when a household gets a new child.

00:27:30.800 I hope that that was a translation issue.

00:27:35.860 And Danes appear to fare even worse on this front than their Nordic neighbors, Mickelson said, citing one news story from Danish media outlet Zetland.

00:27:43.700 Quote, when having a child, you have a big job and responsibility at home, but your paid work schedule does not change.

00:27:49.800 Preach, sister.

00:27:51.060 Mickelson said in a phone interview,

00:27:52.640 quote, our jobs aren't flexible

00:27:54.100 to match different life phases.

00:27:55.940 Personally, I just got going with my career

00:27:58.040 and have so many interests, she added.

00:28:00.280 My thought is that some of that drive disappears

00:28:02.400 when becoming a parent

00:28:03.360 simply because there's not enough energy.

00:28:05.560 Okay, so two things jumped out at me immediately.

00:28:08.240 The first is that it really is all relative.

00:28:11.920 That you could have a person living in Denmark

00:28:13.820 being like, well, the other Nordic countries 0.77

00:28:16.660 have it better, whereas an American parent 1.00

00:28:19.200 would be like you fucking bitch like how dare you so the first thing is that it's all relative that 1.00

00:28:24.960 you're always as long as you can look to your nordic neighbor and be like well the norwegians 1.00

00:28:30.040 have it better than we do and the danes even though the norwegians are like where do we look 0.94

00:28:34.220 oh fuck it really is good but like let's zoom out a second and look at all of human history 0.91

00:28:41.520 somebody living in copenhagen in the year 2025 is more privileged in this regard in the ability 0.99

00:28:48.780 and like the support that you have to have kids than probably 99.9% of humanity that has like

00:28:55.580 ever lived. I mean, Americans are probably still like 99.1. So it's not like we're far off, which

00:29:01.220 I think we're going to come back to, but it's all relative. The second thing is she's actually

00:29:05.720 hitting on something that is like my pet theory about this topic, which is that it still comes

00:29:10.780 down to work culture. That if in a modern capitalist economy, work culture is such that

00:29:16.980 even with all of the support that you can get, it still feels like where is the time going to come

00:29:25.360 from? And so my theory is if you actually want people to have kids, if we can all agree that

00:29:32.780 people having families is a good thing. Narrator, we cannot. You are going to see that people do 0.80

00:29:39.580 not agree with that. Go on. Okay, but let's say for argument's sake that we all can get on the

00:29:43.980 same page that we want everybody to feel totally unrestrained to have their own family, right?

00:29:48.480 Whatever that looks like for them. If the work week were 10 hours and not 40,

00:29:53.900 I think you would see a lot of people making different choices. But as long as like 40 to 50

00:29:59.160 hours is kind of the norm, I don't really care what social safety nets you put in place. People

00:30:03.980 are still going to be like, where the fuck is the time going to come from? Yep, I completely agree. 0.99

00:30:08.640 All of these things, as you have noted, are always a mix. But I think that I would say the 40-hour

00:30:11.880 work in my head slots into public policy change and economic change. And then the other thing I

00:30:17.980 would say that I think about a lot, I was thinking about Denmark and what is it like to have a child

00:30:22.120 in Denmark and where would my issues still be? I think it also has to do with housing. I think

00:30:27.220 people in Denmark still live in homes and still have to get the car seat and clunk it down the

00:30:32.760 stairs and walk it to the daycare. Movement, both friction and isolation in modern housing

00:30:38.740 that did not exist previously.

00:30:40.840 Like, I think previously you would have had

00:30:42.200 a bunch of people raising kids together

00:30:44.120 and your kid isn't leaving the house on a daily basis.

00:30:47.080 And I think every parent will say

00:30:49.440 that those can often be the most miserable parts

00:30:52.240 of parenting is when you're trying to shuttle your child

00:30:54.680 to a new location and you're mapping out snacks 0.97

00:30:57.260 or whatever the fuck. 0.99

00:30:58.120 Oh, dude, I hate to fucking schlep. 1.00

00:30:59.720 I hate schlepping. 0.99

00:31:00.260 I hate schlepping.

00:31:01.700 That would be a reason why I would choose

00:31:03.480 not to have a child.

00:31:04.480 Yeah, I love it.

00:31:05.940 You know what?

00:31:06.500 Car seats.

00:31:06.900 If you are on the fence, 1.00

00:31:07.800 go to a fucking airport and watch parents carry that stroller through Terminal C, you will never 1.00

00:31:14.840 miss a birth control pill again. I think that there is a truth to that that then also gets 1.00

00:31:20.020 into like maybe cultural malaise, but I think more so this is about how we structure and build our

00:31:24.560 communities, how we build our cities. And it's really interesting because everyone I know will

00:31:28.620 be like, well, you can't live in a city when you have a kid. You need like a house and a garage.

00:31:32.420 Wait, can I actually comment on that? I just moved from a four-bedroom home in the suburbs

00:31:37.440 That was a drive away from everything to a two-bedroom apartment in the city where I can walk to everything.

00:31:42.980 And I was apprehensive at first because I was like, man, but I've gotten so accustomed to having my attached three-car garage where, like, my car's right there.

00:31:53.880 I just, boop, right into the house, right?

00:31:55.480 You know, the door is the door.

00:31:56.940 I don't have to enter in through a separate garage and then, like, go up to the flight of stairs and, like, down the hallway and whatever.

00:32:03.000 Yeah.

00:32:03.180 But the amount of time that I have saved and the amount of convenience that has been reintroduced to my life by living somewhere walkable, the quote-unquote convenience of the suburbs with all the space in the garage, whatever, I completely concede that this could be different with kids.

00:32:19.440 I'm speaking about my own experience here, but I do think the convenience of the suburbs is largely a mirage.

00:32:25.820 I completely agree. That's why so much art has been dedicated to turning into a dystopic hell.

00:32:29.680 Okay, let's continue reading this article.

00:32:33.860 Danish columnist Thomas Balslev has written—

00:32:36.680 I knew you were going to laugh. 1.00

00:32:39.320 Balslev, yeah, fuck. 1.00

00:32:40.400 I'm a 12-year-old boy. 0.99

00:32:42.640 Thomas Balslev has written about the hardships and the daily stress of becoming a father for the Danish culture magazine Heartbeats.

00:32:52.980 Many of his male friends question whether they want children, he said.

00:32:56.420 To some, the experience sounds like a bummer.

00:32:58.880 Tell me about it. Also, it's a sign of the times to break with expectations and create your own

00:33:04.360 unique life journey, Balslev said, including by delaying parenthood or avoiding it altogether.

00:33:10.120 As part of the solution, Balslev tries to talk up parenthood. Parenthood is fantastic,

00:33:15.560 while the toughest periods only last a couple of years, he said. Okay, I think that's probably

00:33:19.760 actually largely true. Still, with both men and women struggling to have children, Balslev pointed

00:33:25.420 out that fertility in Denmark is generally bad. Huh. One in eight children here are born via

00:33:31.000 fertility treatment, and both men and women's fertility are generally challenged. That's

00:33:35.180 interesting. Just in 2024, the number of women seeking to have their egg reserves counted has 0.99

00:33:39.520 shot up drastically. Currently, there's a three-year-long waiting list for the procedure.

00:33:44.080 Wow. In the meantime, many young Danes will likely continue foregoing parenthood. If Danish 0.62

00:33:49.100 politicians really want to increase the number of children, Mickelson thinks they should focus

00:33:53.120 on improving factors like work-life balance for future parents. Right now, she argued,

00:33:58.660 politicians tell people to have more children while also emphasizing how every adult needs

00:34:02.560 to work more. Quote, this is a very hardcore paradox to live with, she said. How can you do

00:34:07.920 both things at once? Thoughts? Oh, man. Ah, yeah, my confirmation bias is confirmed. It's so funny

00:34:17.660 to be on this side of the Atlantic and then hearing Danish people being like, well, if our government

00:34:22.480 really wants us to have more kids. It just feels like they're literally having the exact same 0.95

00:34:27.620 conversation just like with, but they already have all the things that we say would make us

00:34:31.720 have more kids. Right. So one other note about Denmark that I just thought was funny is that

00:34:35.860 the prime minister of Denmark is a woman named Mehta Fredriksen. She's a social democrat.

00:34:40.960 Must be nice. In 2021, Katie, she said she wanted to be known as the prime minister of children.

00:34:48.220 Who does that sound like? Oh, fucking hell, dude. I hate you for doing this to me. 0.99

00:34:52.480 Ha, ha, ha, ha. Pronatalism is broad.

00:34:57.520 No, but I mean, honestly, fuck. I feel so deprived of good leadership that if we had a woman social Democrat president, I'd be like, how many babies do you want me to have? 1.00

00:35:09.500 Oh, I'd do anything she wants. 1.00

00:35:11.220 The uterus is open, babe. 0.90

00:35:14.640 We're going to talk about that, Katie, because your sentiment is shared by many liberal women.

00:35:19.580 Okay. So, what do Democrats do, Katie? The social safety net does not give you more kids. You don't want to be a far-right neo-Nazi, but Democrats do want kids. Make no mistake. Democrats in Congress do want us to have children, like anyone else in any other government wants us to have children. So, what do the Democrats do? 0.69

00:35:40.580 Oh, this isn't rhetorical?

00:35:42.300 No, no, no. I want you to say it out loud. I want you to say it on the record, what they do.

00:35:45.360 They don't do anything.

00:35:46.580 They don't do anything! 0.99

00:35:47.740 Buddha just went on the podcast and we're all like, yes, queen, let's fucking go. 0.96

00:35:52.640 This is your daily reminder that the Trump administration is not a blip, but the end 1.00

00:35:57.180 result of people doing jackal shit for 40 years. What Democrats do is like gesture vaguely at the 0.96

00:36:03.780 need for policy reform and occasionally do like wonderful but completely unoriginal things like

00:36:09.360 giving poor people a very small amount of money to live on. And then they see the results about

00:36:13.900 how that would improve everyone's lives.

00:36:15.680 And then they go, that's enough.

00:36:16.920 We're not going to go any farther than that.

00:36:18.480 Well, and it's like,

00:36:19.320 I feel like the classic defense is like,

00:36:21.420 well, they didn't have the majority.

00:36:23.060 Like their hands were tied. 1.00

00:36:24.940 Chelsea Fagan had a funny line. 1.00

00:36:27.760 She'll be like, 1.00

00:36:28.640 we have to stop making that excuse for them.

00:36:31.280 When the Republicans didn't get their way,

00:36:33.100 Mitch McConnell would literally like chain himself

00:36:35.360 to the furnace until somebody changed their mind.

00:36:39.260 We are witnessing right now

00:36:40.960 what is possible when you stand on business.

00:36:44.380 Granted, they're standing on business

00:36:46.040 for an authoritarian dystopia.

00:36:47.980 But like, let us learn from it.

00:36:49.840 Exactly.

00:36:50.660 If you have power, use it.

00:36:53.260 Number one, we have had a number

00:36:55.020 of Democratic supermajorities over the last 20 years,

00:36:58.400 and they have not been brought

00:37:00.020 to any sort of creative solution

00:37:02.500 to make things easier for parents

00:37:03.960 or for any perennialist policy.

00:37:05.720 Why do you think that is?

Diabolical Lies - May 04, 2025

Who Wants Kids？

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