If You Want to Raise Birthrates, You Need to Fix Men

My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Here’s what people are saying:

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A year and a half ago, Liberal Currents editor Samantha Hancox-Li presented a theory about gender relations and declining birthrates that I think about often. In her words, birthrates are declining because women now “have options outside the patriarchal bargain” under which they previously had to “provide reproductive labor in exchange for security.” Because they are no longer systematically excluded from the professions or the banking sector, women can now obtain that security for themselves without having to submit to patriarchal authority in the home. Meanwhile, men “haven’t figured out how to adapt” to a world where women don’t “need men for economic or physical security.”

It’s a compelling theory, and now we have some data to back it up. A new NBER working paper from economist Claudia Goldin argues the following, according to its abstract: “Men generally benefit more from maintaining traditions; women often benefit more from eschewing them. When the probability is low that men will abandon traditions, some career women will not have children and others will delay.”

I already used up all my free NBER downloads for this year, but I was intrigued by this abstract, so I decided to dig up an earlier version of Goldin’s paper, from spring of this year. It’s a fairly lengthy and dense piece of economic analysis, but one relatively easy-to-parse chunk of Goldin’s argument stuck out to me. It has to do with a comparison of two groups of developed countries: “Group 1” countries that have moderate (albeit still below replacement) fertility rates, and “Group 2” countries that have very low fertility rates.

Goldin identifies a couple of telling differences between these two groups. The first is that Group 1 countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have experienced sustained economic growth over the past century, whereas the Group 2 countries (Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Spain) had stagnant economies until the second half of the twentieth century, when they started to rapidly gain on the Group 1 countries. See Figure 12 from the paper below.

Now here’s where things get interesting. The Group 1 countries saw fertility rates gradually decline in tandem with the relatively steady growth of their economies. On the other hand, fertility in the Group 2 countries went from well above replacement to an utter collapse right around the time their economies took off. See Figure 11 below.

Goldin hypothesizes that birthrates fell rapidly in these countries because their economic growth was too sudden for gender norms to catch up. In Hancox-Li’s terms, Group 1 countries had more time to acclimate themselves to the breakdown of the patriarchal bargain and develop new, relatively egalitarian child-rearing settlements. Women in Group 1 countries can therefore have children by male partners without having to sacrifice all of their hard-won independence in exchange. In Group 2 countries, men—unaccustomed as they are to the new reality of women’s economic liberation—are more likely to still demand subservience from potential mates.

Here’s one more chart to drive the point home:

The Group 1 countries are all clustered on the left side of the above chart, whereas the Group 2 countries are all clustered on the right side. Which is to say, men and women split household work (including care work) more evenly in the Group 1 countries, while women in the Group 2 countries still shoulder significantly more of the childcare and housework burden than their male partners.

(Some, though not all, of the Group 1 countries also have generous family leave and childcare safety nets. But the United States is a notable exception, and, as Goldin notes, “there is scant evidence that the birth rate has been much affected by policies such as subsidies for family leave, childcare, and housing, as well as cash transfers conditional on marriage or a birth.”)

That doesn’t mean the Group 1 countries are perfectly egalitarian. As you can see, the average French or German woman still does approximately 90 minutes more household work than her male partner on a daily basis, and she fares better than her American and British counterparts. But compared to Japan, Korea, Italy, or, especially, Portugal, these are still pretty feminist societies, at least going by the household work metric. And the more feminist societies are the ones with birthrates that are closer to replacement.

In other words, Goldin presents us with some inconclusive but highly suggestive evidence that feminism is not the reason birthrates have fallen below replacement in much of the developed world. Rather, it seems that birthrates have fallen because the feminist revolution remains unfinished. If you’re worried about population collapse, then I have two solutions for you: attract many more immigrants, and figure out how to loosen the patriarchal bargain’s grip on the masculine imagination. The second goal, while necessary, is going to be a lot harder to achieve than the first.