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Robin Hanson: Culture as it Relates to Fertility Decline
In this episode, we are joined by the renowned economist and author Robin Hansen, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. The discussion centers around the challenging issue of fertility decline and its cultural underpinnings. Hansen outlines various trends contributing to lower fertility rates, such as prolonged education, intensive parenting, gender equality, urban living, and less religious adherence. He also explores the interaction of culture and economy, the potential for policy interventions, and the role of subcultures in addressing demographic challenges. Additionally, they touch on historical patterns, the evolution of cultures, and the strategies for fostering sustainable, high-fertility communities. The conversation offers a rich and insightful analysis of one of today's pressing societal issues.
[00:00:00]
Simone Collins: Hello everyone. As you can see today, we are joined by the one, the only, the incredibly prolific and brilliant Robin Hansen. He is the American economist author. He's also an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. But he is known for some of the most catchy ideas, ranging from grabby aliens to one of the most popular fertility intervention proposals, which has to do with sort of like a tax bonds on children's future tax generated income.
But most recently on the prenatal list front Robin Hansen's focus has been shifting to culture. So we wanted to have him on base camp to talk about prenatal list culture. Welcome, Robin.
Robin Hanson: Hello everyone. So, as you know, culture, I mean, fertility looks like a pretty hard problem, like, right? Yeah. So you guys are working hard.
I hope you have success, but you, you get that it's an uphill battle, right? Yeah, yeah. But so at least I feel good about fertility that I can. Frame a proposal and say it in words and say, if only you would do this, it'll probably fix the problem. That doesn't mean you can get somebody to do it, but [00:01:00] it's a nice thing to have is to be able to, yes.
Have a concrete proposal and say, look, if you do this, that would fix it.
Simone Collins: Yes.
Robin Hanson: And that's as a policymaker, I'm proud. Like that's kind of our job. Like, okay, if you guys won't do anything, you know what the hell Yeah. That's on
Simone Collins: you. Yeah. You could have it's, you could have had nice
Robin Hanson: things. We could, we at least had an idea for what to do.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Robin Hanson: But so I thought about for. Fertility for like eight months. And then like most people in fertility, I came to see culture underlying as a fundamental cause of fertility decline. It's, it doesn't mean that we have to fix it that way. Right? We can fix things with money that are caused by culture.
That's a, if you can
Simone Collins: afford it. Yeah. Right. If
Robin Hanson: you can afford it. Money and culture interact and have for many centuries, yes. Like capitalism and culture have had a lot of influences on each other. So just because something's caused by culture doesn't mean it needs to be fixed by culture directly. That is, you could do a a money thing that changes culture and I think the money thing we talked about in our last episode is such a thing that would change culture.
But you certainly notice that the proximate cause of the problem is [00:02:00] culture. And that induced me more of a theorist to say, okay, why? Hmm. What's causing culture to change? What is it just some random, you know, thing that just happens in the world? Or is there some more systematic way to understand why culture?
So it's not, it's like a half a dozen trends. I can point out that cons that seem to be causing fertility decline. You,
Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago