Episode Details

In this episode, Malcolm notices a surprising pattern in the historical fertility data: in nearly every country where women entered the workforce in large numbers during/around WWII (US, Canada, Australia, UK, etc.), there was a massive post-war Baby Boom. In countries where female labor-force participation stayed low or stable (Japan, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland), there was little to no boom.

We explore whether “female empowerment” (in the classic 1920s–1940s sense — voting rights, workforce entry, cultural excitement) actually halted fertility decline and temporarily reversed it, while modern feminism and declining gender complementarity may be contributing to today’s collapse. We also discuss vitalism, bigender vitalism, why groypers have low fertility despite their “vitalism,” and why making women feel like valued lieutenants (not house-slaves or girl-bosses) matters for both marriage stability and higher birth rates.

If you care about solving the fertility crisis, this counter-intuitive historical correlation is worth grappling with.Episode Transcript:

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be doing one of those things where I notice something in the data and I ignore it, and then I think about it for a bit and I’m like, wait a second.

I should pay a lot more attention to this than I am. So one of the graphs that I often like to show is a graph of falling fertility rates since the 18 hundreds. And when the feminist movement really began to pick up steam to show that the vast majority of fertility collapse happened before the feminist movement began to pick up steam.

But then I had this no notice in my head when I was thinking. I was like, you know, I just noticed something about when feminism starts in this movement, which is fertility collapse goes down dramatically. The moment feminism starts in every country, but the UK by the way.

So here on, have on screen a chart of fertility collapse [00:01:00] within the United States and what you can see, Simone, I’m sure you’re familiar with this one.

Simone Collins: No, I know this one. That sort of shows also France seeing a really rapid decline.

Malcolm Collins: No, it’s not that one. It’s the one in the United States.

Simone Collins: . Okay. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So what you see here is fertility rates go down. Really rapidly between 1835 and 1850, like as rapidly as after the baby boom. Mm-hmm. And then they go like directly downwards.

You have this incredibly fast fertility downwards motion from 1835 to around 18. Sorry, 1935 or? No, 1940 is about when it ends. Yeah. So it ends at 1940. Mm-hmm. Do you guys know what happened to happen during 1940? Or what happened in the 1920s, 1920s, women got the right to vote. 1940s is not just when you had the baby boomer, but also when you had a, a pretty big feminist wave going into World War ii.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Women were [00:02:00] working in the factories. They were entering the workforce in record numbers. Right. It was pretty, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And what we’re gonna go over here. In this episode is countries where women entered the workforce versus countries where women didn’t enter the workforce. Ooh. And what you might be surprised about is it’s very correlary with those country whether or not the country’s had a baby boom.

Oh. That might actually be the explanatory phenomenon of the baby boom we’ve been looking at is whether female

Simone Collins: empowered.

Malcolm Collins: Female empowerment may have been what? Holy the baby boom. And what’s also very interesting is if you ignore, so let’s say

in this graph, I’m gonna ignore the baby boom and then the, the bust