Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children reveals America’s birth rate collapse mirrors Rome’s pre-fall decline, with 40 years of failed subsidies—like baby bonuses—proving governments can discourage but not incentivize parenthood. Interviews with 55 high-fertility women (5+ children) show they view kids as divine blessings, reshaping lives for deeper purpose, contradicting media narratives framing motherhood as a societal burden. Church communities validate their choices, while secular disrespect and lack of meaning drive the trend, suggesting cultural shifts—not economics—hold the key to reversing decline. [Automatically generated summary]
It's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Catherine Pakolik, the author of Hannah's Children, The Women Quietly Define the Birth Dearth.
I think this is probably the most important story in the world.
The birth rate in America is near record lows.
And this is a place where Elon Musk and I agree absolutely.
This endangers the continuation of humanity and certainly the continuation of our government and our form of government.
It happened before the fall of the Roman Empire.
The population of Rome just bottomed out.
The city of Rome, I think, went from like a million people to something like 50,000 people.
And of course, you can't have a city without people in it.
It's just buildings.
It doesn't mean a thing.
And women in Rome went from having 12 children to, on average, to two.
And it's frightening to see this happening without anybody really talking about it or anybody who is talking about it coming up with any ideas that have worked in the past.
They're constantly saying we should give them a mom bonus or we should give them this free thing or that free thing.
And it simply does not do the trick.
Catherine Pakolik has written this book, Hannah's Children, the Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, which did something incredibly intelligent, which was to study those women who are still having children and find out what made them different from the women who aren't.
Catherine, thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
You're welcome.
It's great to be here.
So tell me how this idea came to you.
You are an economist, is that right?
That's right.
Yeah.
And so I'm a bit of a, well, all right.
Do you want me to go way back?
So the idea came to me.
It's really a sort of a funny idea, but a simple one.
I mean, it's this kind of principle of immunity sort of, you know, there's been this constant concern, right, going back 200 or more years, you know, going back to Malthus, but as you pointed out, go back to the Roman Empire.
I mean, right, this constant concern about whether we'll have too many people, too few people.
There's the doomsday thinking, which goes back.
And as an economist, you come up cutting your teeth on this stuff.
Why was Malthus wrong?
And one of the things that we focus on as economists, that kind of mainstream economists focus on is that Malthus kind of got food production wrong.
He didn't anticipate or envision the kind of abundance that we've had and we've enjoyed.
But of course, Malthus got something else deeply wrong, which was sort of how rational animals actually reproduce in very different ways from the animal kingdom.
And this has typically been missed, right?
So it's not just that we've had more prosperity, but actually that we're really not rabbits.
And so coming up to Fast Forward, I thought, well, you know, everybody's studying this population decline, right?
And no one's kind of thinking more broadly about why people have children at all, which is like a really interesting question.
Why do people have children at all?
And so for the economist, it's kind of a normal move.
It's sort of like, well, what's the sort of principle of human action involved?
Is this, you know, so then, you know, kind of coming up to the beginning of the book, I thought, well, we could look around at the places where birth rates are falling.
I mean, it's everywhere.
Or we could kind of dig more deeply into the variation in different countries and ask, where are birth rates not falling?
And so that was kind of the beginning of the idea, just study the outliers.
That's actually an inspired idea because a lot of economists talk about the economy as if it were a bunch of numbers reacting to one another.
But of course, it's got people in it.
And so there has to be human motivation.
Give us an idea where we are.
How bad is this problem right now?
How bad is the birth rate?
Yeah.
Well, it's very bad.
It's very dire if, you know, big if, if you care about, you know, sort of things we've come to think of as basic parts of our life.
I mean, the type of government that we have with kind of a generous government, a government that, you know, provides all kinds of benefits and things.
You know, of course, what I largely mean is a social welfare state.
I may not be the biggest fan of parts of the social welfare state, but if you care about those things, if you care about economic growth, it's very bad.
All right, so where are we?
Replacement fertility would be on average, every woman has about two children, one for her, one for her partner.
They replace the population.
We have been, and so I'm going to take you back a little bit.
This is what's being missed today.
We have been, among the native-born Americans, below replacement, at or below replacement birth rates, so below two, since the 1970s.
And so when I was following this as a college student and into the early 2000s, people used to say, well, American exceptionalism, we are doing better.
We're not like those Japanese, you know, poor Japan.
They're never going to fix their problem.
And Spain, we used to talk about, but actually, we had this massed by immigration.
So we didn't realize, or at least largely, we didn't realize that.
So we are right now at about 1.6 births per expected lifetime births per woman.
If we were to zero in on the college-educated women, women with postgraduate degrees, that number's a lot lower.
It's down below 1.5.
So the more education people get, kind of the worse that looks.
And that was part of the reason for my book.
So these are really low numbers.
I've just read a paper that was published a couple of days ago, kind of asking, what is the threshold point beyond which populations can't recover?
And there's a lot of debate about that.
But it looks like somewhere around a little above two makes it very, very difficult for populations to really expect to go on.
So we are really in that place where significant portions of our population will not have a future, will not have a future.
Can you explain that?
Why would you not be able to recover?
Yeah, so really just we're thinking about how many if you if you make basic assumptions, which again, those assumptions could be wrong, but you make basic assumptions about how many children each woman has, you could get to a point where there's so few women and so few children are expected for her to have that even if some tiny group of people has a bunch of kids, you know, you just can't get past it.
No, it's not to say that some countries, some nations, some peoples couldn't carry on.
Of course they could carry on.
But the character of those peoples that continue will be profoundly different from the character of who they are today, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So, all right.
So you did a study.
Before we get to what you were studying, though, let me ask you one last thing.
The things that have been tried, the giving baby bonuses and maternity leave and all this, does this ever work?
Has it ever worked anywhere?
Yeah, no, no, it really hasn't worked.
But I'll put a little bit of nuance on that.
Yeah, so first of all, we have at least 40 years of efforts to do this.
And there's actually some really great historical examples too.
So I say 40 years in the modern era of countries in Australia, Austria, lots and lots of examples.
Parts of Canada have experimented with this.
And usually they look like these kind of baby bonuses, sort of direct subsidies.
I call these direct incentives to have children.
And they don't seem to work at all.
So in the last 40 years, we don't have any examples.
Historically, there's a lot of really, there are a lot of really interesting commentaries.
There are kings and monarchs and all kinds of examples from history of governments sort of trying to encourage a birth rate, right?
Because of course, the birth rate's essential for all kinds of things.
And when we go back to pre-modern times, most populations are kind of on a razor's edge.
They're not growing.
They get a little ahead.
The plague wipes them out.
They kind of go back and forth.
There's not really sustained population growth.
So people have tried many times.
And one really interesting comment I found in my research for this book was a French economist in the 19th century said, sovereigns are not very effective when they try to encourage the birth rate, but they're terribly effective when they discourage it.
So there's a terrible asymmetry there.
It's not that hard to discourage people who want to have children from having children.
But if people don't want to have children, it turns out to be very difficult to offer them carrots to get them to do this.
Yeah.
So when you decide to go out and look for the women who are having children, what did you do?
How did you find them?
Yeah.
Well, I just followed sort of best practices for this kind of research, which is, it's going to sound like really unexciting.
I mean, you just kind of go around and you go to places where you know families are.
You post flyers.
You say, hey, I'd like to talk to people with a bunch of kids.
And so that's largely what we did.
We picked about 10 cities around the country.
We posted flyers with looking for people who, you know, broadly married, have a college education and have a bunch of kids and like consider their family size as purposeful.
Like we weren't looking for accidental births.
Anyway, and then we solicited applications through a kind of QR code.
And we had about 600 people apply to be interviewed.
We could only interview less than 10% of that group.
So we interviewed about 55 women.
Yeah.
So that's what we did.
It's not glamorous.
You just kind of, it's a brute force.
You go out and I suppose I should have used Instagram more, but next time around, I will make use of a research assistant who could use Instagram.
So starting with the general idea, what were your findings?
Yeah.
So let's make a contrast before I say what the general finding is.
The contrast would be these baby bonus ideas, they kind of, they have something in mind, right?
They have something in mind, which is that sort of people respond to incentives and that there's some kind of cost-benefit thing going on inside, you know, in the kind of calculus of how people think about having children.
Now, I don't think that's crazy.
I doubt that it's crazy.
But of course, what we've seen is that at least these little bonuses, they don't do the trick.
So what I was looking for was kind of like, am I going to find out that the people who have kids today, they kind of, they just have a lower cost of supplying children.
Like it's just easy for them to have kids.
They're people who, you know, are really well off.
Like the costs don't matter to them.
So I could have found out that the story for these people was that it was just easier for them.
They didn't mind being pregnant, right?
Like the kinds of things people say.
And I would put those in the bucket of sort of costs, right?
Kind of different ways of sizing up the costs.
Maybe, for instance, people who didn't care at all about work or about other things.
It's like their favorite thing to do, right?
Okay.
On the other side, you could maybe find explanations that are kind of on the demand side or the cost-benefit side, the benefit side.
Like what are the benefits?
What do they think are, like, what's essentially the value of having children?
And so what I kind of went out and found, you know, I heard a lot of things about costs and we could get around to that, but I was overwhelmed, deluged with a story about value, about the value of children.
So I thought, well, this is fascinating.
This is not a group of people who say, you know, I really, I think careers are terrible.
You know, I've got like this trad wife mentality.
I think it's evil to go out and work.
You know, I'm wearing skirts and hanging around.
Instead, there was a lot of variation in career interests and work engagement with work.
But what I found out instead was that this is a group of people who said, this is the most important thing I can do.
It's the most, most valuable thing.
That was their idea.
Fascinating Career Priorities00:02:11
This is it.
I was deluged with that.
That was the common finding.
They had different language for that.
Most valuable thing I can do, most meaningful thing I can do, a great blessing.
Children are expressions of divine goodness.
So anything I need to do to rearrange the other things that are valuable to me, I will do that.
I will rearrange those things.
So to sum it up, I would say the sort of the main central finding was that the story of people having kids today against this trend is a story of people who see tremendous value in children.
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And have essentially organized their lives like on purpose.
They rearranged things.
Families In Local Communities00:15:59
They picked how to spend their time.
In many cases, they picked cheaper houses or they picked lifestyles accordingly.
They rearranged their lives to welcome children.
So it's really a demand story or a value story and not a low-cost story.
That is really interesting.
So, and was that, did you interview the husbands as well or just the women?
Great question.
I didn't.
And that is the next project.
Your question is the single most asked question I've had in the time I've been talking about this book.
And I didn't, you know, for just research reasons.
I mean, you're kind of going out, you're thinking, well, I've got to keep some variables constant here.
And, you know, basically we've got this really interesting story in the 20th century of the women's movement.
I mean, at least the second wave feminism, women's movement.
You know, how does that interact with this question, like what people want, what women want.
So I did write one chapter where I kind of said all the things I could say about the men in my study.
I learned a few things along the way, but absolutely, I mean, before we finished the first month of interviews, we looked at each other and said, we have got to come back and interview the dads.
That is next up.
I am beginning that now.
So we're talking to Catherine Ruth Pacolic.
Hannah's Children is the book.
Hannah's Children, the Women Quietly Define the Birth Dearth.
Just briefly, Hannah, I should have looked her up.
She's in the Bible.
She's the mother of one of the prophets, right?
Yes, she's the mother of Samuel.
Okay.
And why did you pick her as?
Well, I picked her for a couple of reasons.
I was looking for kind of an archetype.
So we're thinking like, well, the main, so first of all, you know, as you know, I tried to tell this story in a narrative fashion.
I'm a very strong believer that story and narrative communicates meaning more deeply and more effectively than lists of numbers and statistics.
So I don't think you have to be less faithful to the data.
So I thought, well, what's an image that's available to us culturally of really intense desire for children?
And I thought, well, who's that lady in the in the who's that lady who like wanted a kid so desperately?
And that was Hannah.
Yeah.
In fact, she wanted a kid so desperately and then got Samuel in this kind of miraculous way that actually the, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a biblical exegete and I don't know a lot about classical languages, but most dictionaries will render the name Hannah as being blessed by God with a child.
Yeah.
So I use her as an archetype to explain like the women who are having kids share something deeply in common with that Hannah.
So what was it?
What was it that gave them this sense of a child's value?
I mean, I think that would be the big question right now.
Right.
Right.
So I'm here to say this isn't a representative sample, but 98% of the people I interviewed, it was what we call like a biblical heritage.
It was sort of an Abrahamic tradition.
It was a very specific set of, we could certainly say kind of biblical beliefs.
I wouldn't say that was the only thing, and we can get to a couple of other pieces of this too, but the central most important thing was a kind of package of maybe three things that are easy to place firmly in that Abrahamic tradition.
First is that children are blessings from God.
And the way they often put it is something divine, expressions of divine goodness.
And the second thing is that children are the purpose of their marriages.
So there was a very fairly strong claim that marriage is, these marriages are about children.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, one of the stories that I did read was at the very beginning of the book, there's a story of a woman on a train who has six children.
Can you tell that?
I found that story incredibly moving, and I'm not even sure why, but can you tell that story?
Yes.
So that was my story.
And it's actually the story which first got me thinking about writing this book.
And so it's why I tell it right at the beginning.
Yeah, it was a fascinating moment.
I was riding home from a conference.
I had flown into Washington, D.C., and I got on a commuter train.
I just had my sixth baby a few months ago, and I was coming home on a commuter train.
So it's mostly people from work.
But me with this baby, I've got this baby like tucked into a thing, like a package.
You know, we carry the baby around.
Just the head is sticking out.
Just like you, actually, kind of a baldish head is sticking out.
Just enough peach fuzz that people want to reach out.
I don't know if that happens to you, but people want to be able to do that.
That's why you're going to take care of me all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And so I sat on this train.
I kind of squeezed in there.
It's like six o'clock.
And, you know, people coming out of work and they're not, most, mostly people with babies aren't on the train.
And this lady next to me kind of looks over and says, well, like, is it your first?
And I don't know why people ask that question.
And I kind of looked at her.
You're having this battle with yourself.
You're saying, like, do I just nod my head and say, yeah, you know, just avoid.
And I, you know, I said, no, no, you know, this is by sixth.
And then there was this guy, it's a closely packed train.
So everybody heard.
This exchange and a bunch of people said, like you know oh six and, and she just looked right back at me she said, wow I, I guess your husband still wants you.
Wow that, that really got me.
Yeah, oh I, it got me.
Yeah, I thought what is going on with that um, but you know, that's that question of desire right, it's the question of what brings us together.
Yeah how, how marriage is doing in our society uh, how bound to each other people feel, how disillusioned they feel by the loss of desire for each other, the loss of commitment.
I mean, it's like a lot's bound up in there.
And, of course, I just asked myself the question gosh like, to what extent are children part of that package of how marriage is doing?
And did you find uh, the women that you interviewed?
Did you find them talking about that, about their, their marriage relationship in regards to the children?
Yes and uh, in fact, I probed for that.
I asked some.
You know I I pulled um headlines from places like VOX uh, because you see these articles like every three months.
Like you know, first she got married and then, you know, and it was great, and then, and then the kid came and her, her marriage was ruined, you know, or like, having kids will ruin your sex life, you know, you see these things all the time.
So I brought these articles, these headlines that I said, you know look, people say this and um, what's your experience, you know, is, is the romance over?
Is that anyway?
You know, this isn't just positive right, but um, but if the narrative is kind of like, kids are in a sense um, there's your marriage and then there's your kids, like marriage quality is over here, it's a box over here.
We're not really sure what keeps the spark alive.
You know, you might need to spice things up, you might need some, we're not really sure.
But, you know, do what you need to do.
And then there's your kids over here and you know, you kind of like uh, like animals in a cage maybe, like you can't have too many of them right, because it might just threaten this other recreational thing that you do um, and so what I really heard was something very deeply different um, things like no no, actually our kids bring us together.
It's a purp, it's um, it's like a mission.
We go on a mission together or we've grown because we're each um, we're each growing up, raising our kids, and so now, like my, I see my husband as as an even better man says more to love.
You know this kind of thing, so you know.
This isn't to say that you know, all marriages with, with several children will will be perfect uh, but this is a really different story from that one that you see in these kind of mainstream narratives that are skeptical about the value of children.
Um, so I did include lots of those chapters have um, some pretty heartwarming stories about both, um the both, the quality of the marriages going going, going forward after lots of kids, and also just some great quotes.
I mean, this one lady said something like, you know, when you have a lot of kids with a man, he either becomes a jerk or a rock star, she said.
And she said, luckily for me, it went, it went the rock star direction, you know.
So, really great.
You know, I was just uh, I was at Cornell uh speaking and um, a young woman.
After my speech, a young woman came into the room, hadn't been at the speech and just ran up to me and I did a show with some horrifying title like bang your wife and save the country, and she said.
She said, do you still believe that.
I said I believe it twice as much because I think it's really important, and she was looked so relieved I didn't get a chance to ask her what her story was, but it actually obviously had moved her.
That's really great.
So you keep saying these, this is not a representative sample.
In which way is it not a representative sample?
Yeah.
So what I mean is, you know, because of, you know, I'm still, like I said, I'd say I'm still sensitive to the cancel culture world that we are hopefully coming out of, which is, you know, don't say your stuff does more than it does.
Here's what I mean.
I interviewed 55 women who are perhaps not representative of all women with lots of children.
Right.
So to do that, I would need to do kind of a plausibly random sampling of all the women in the country with five or more children.
If anybody wants to donate to that cause, I would love to do that project.
Right.
But what you do is you, you know, you head out.
Now, I don't think this is a big problem.
In other words, like a question you could ask me, which people have asked me, is, you know, like how representative do you think your sample is?
Like how, you know.
So I think it's pretty good in the following sense.
Like, I don't think there are hidden pockets of people with five or six kids out there that are just totally motivated by completely different things.
I do think there's a minority group, probably, I mean, if I'm just guessing here, I would say probably, you know, maybe 5 to 10% of people with families that have kind of that are secular, but maybe kind of deeply humanist reasons for performing families and having families.
In fact, many of them have reached out to me since the book was written.
And I'm hoping to interview some of them going forward.
But I do think my sample in terms of religious commitment and kind of the value of children, I think it's fairly representative of in that sense.
But I'm, you know, I don't have evidence of that.
So one of the drums I bang all the time is the disrespect, I think, for motherhood, which seems to me to be the center of the universe.
I mean, it seems like motherhood is basically the core function of human life.
And if you're living in a, it's so easy to say, well, here's $5,000 to have a baby.
You know, you can say that.
I can count the money out.
I know where it goes.
And the fact that it doesn't work is just a sort of a bad side effect.
But at least as a politician, I can say I'm doing this thing.
How then do you restore the idea that this is a thing of insane value?
I mean, I always, I see women have babies and come back to work like the next week.
And I once actually bumped into a woman I know who had done that and blurted out, what are you doing here?
And she burst into tears.
And I thought, well, maybe there's no way to do this anymore.
What would you say?
Do you have a kind of program that would maybe restore our respect and even reverence for this role?
That's a great question.
And first of all, I really want to affirm what you said.
I think a lot of women in that moment are deeply conflicted and wounded by that process or wounded by the feeling that they're trapped.
Oftentimes, couples without good, without foresight or without good advice, they make financial commitments that require them to plan to go back to work immediately before they know how they'll feel about separating from that baby.
And that's a great, great tragedy.
Something that I've repeated frequently is that if your experience of motherhood is one in which you give birth to this divine being that you really want to worship in a sense, I mean, that's how much you've never loved anything as much as this baby.
And then, you know, within the next few months, you have to really detach emotionally on some level from the daily constant care of that human being.
That's not a process you'd like to do many times.
So I do think this almost like unsticking the band-aid that we need to do if we want to sustain that kind of going back and forth to work.
I think that's terribly unpleasant, which is why I think we can see that things like more generous maternity leave or paternity leave packages, I think they're good.
I mean, I think they're good to have and people should be encouraged to take those things, but I don't think they're going to make people have more kids than they're having now because that's just really unpleasant.
I mean, that process is profoundly unpleasant.
What about the culture of extolling motherhood?
So I think this is a fascinating question.
I think this has to do with values.
And what I've seen in the traveling that I did is that the moms I interviewed are deeply aware that they're not valued like in the in the meta culture.
That what they stand for, that what they do looks a little bit like the death of a lot of the things that people deeply value.
You know, your youthful figure, for instance.
I mean, if you, you know, I mean, look at the celebrities that are like buying their surrogates, buying their babies through surrogates so they don't have to get pregnant.
Like specifically, they're not infertile.
They're doing it because they don't want to be pregnant.
And so there's that piece, right?
It looks like, so they're deeply aware that they're not valued in the meta culture.
However, one of the pieces that was clear to me of what makes this possible for some women in local small communities is that they are deeply valued in their church communities, in their local communities.
And really kind of, I think I don't have an easy answer about the broader culture, but I do think that something that is deeply American and was deeply American, which was sort of like, we didn't look to have the meaning of everything settled at a national level.
We may have thought that that was out of reach, but that our local communities could do a lot of that for us.
And so, you know, this is where one of the takeaways for me has been kind of scratch my head a little bit and think like, well, how are we encouraging and treating?
Are we able to, I don't know, are we able to support and encourage the strengthening, the deepening of these, we could call them communities of meaning and purpose.
I mean, we don't get meaning and purpose like from YouTube or from, but these are places where people do this, right?
So they're church.
I mean, largely these are church communities.
A lot of times, like where I live, the church community is spilled over into a neighborhood, a very intentional neighborhood where people walk to each other's homes.
So how do we make it more easy for people to find communities like that, build a life in communities like that?
Because within that community, you don't need the whole world to love you, but you do need like, you know, well, let's see, Mark Zuckerberg tells us it's three friends.
Three Friends, Great Job00:01:16
You do need to have three friends who tell you that you're doing a great job.
Yeah.
So on that front, I'm optimistic, actually.
I'm very optimistic that, you know, as Spencer's written about and Ross is writing about these days, that in fact, this hunger for the divine, this hunger for communities of purpose and meaning is kind of coming back or it's been rediscovered that we're kind of, I'm optimistic that we're in an upward trajectory in that sense.
And I think that family formation will come with it.
Interesting.
Great.
Again, we're talking to Catherine Ruth Bakalik.
The book is Hannah's Children, the Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.
Catherine, if people only take away the fact that meaning doesn't come from YouTube, I think this will be a useful interview.
That's great.
It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, and I hope you'll come back and talk again as you do more work.
I'd love to do that.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks, Andrew.
That was really interesting.
Easier to give people money than to give them meaning, but meaning is there for the taking if you go out and get it.
Catherine Ruth Bakalik, Hannah's Children, The Women Quietly Define, The Birth Dearth, really sounds like a good book and a worthwhile study.
Also worthwhile is the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.