Dr. Karen Guzzo
speaker
132 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Karen Guzzo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So pronatalism is really about raising birth rates at the country level, at the macro level. It's interested in and worried about, are birth rates too low? Do they need to be higher? And there's a lot of debate over what it means for fertility rates to be too low and what might be the best ways to address it. That's really focused on getting the whole country to have more births.
Well, one of the things that's actually driving low fertility rates in the United States is something that's a good news story, which is that there are fewer teen and unintended births. And so births to people who are in their teens and early 20s typically are births to people that are unintended, so that people themselves would say, this is not really the right time for me.
And so we spent a lot of time and a lot of money in the United States trying to discourage people from having first, when they were not really ready. So when they were too young, and I sort of, too young in quotes, too young, or they weren't stably employed or didn't have a good income or a stable relationship. And so we've made a lot of progress in that realm.
But then the flip side of it is people are supposed to wait until they have these things. You know, they're supposed to have enough money and a stable relationship and a good house. And you're right that it's really hard to be able to afford those things. The number one concern over people as to whether they should have kids and how many to have and when to have them is can I afford it?
are different potential concerns. I mean, the biggest one really is that the population starts to age on the aggregate when you have fewer young people born, and then it ends up being skewed towards older adults. And older adults need more care, both physical care, but also they take financial resources.
And so in many countries, and not just in the United States, the question is, how do we care for the older adults when the population is aging? And so in the United States, we have a social security system that's built on current workers paying in to support people who are currently drawing from Social Security. And so that's a big concern is how do we actually care for the elderly?
Then there are also labor market concerns. So who's going to be working to pay into Social Security, but also to fuel the economy? And we need workers because we also need people to have incomes to become consumers. And so we do worry about the potential ramifications of low birth rates, although there's other solutions besides potentially low birth rates to fix some of these problems.
Well, one of the biggest ones would actually be a change in how we structure Social Security. So the way Social Security works is that there's a cap on income. And so you pay up until, I think it's roughly around $175,000 for single people on your payroll taxes. So up until that, you pay Social Security. Any money you earn above that for a single earner is not taxed for Social Security.
And we could raise that cap, or we could eliminate entirely, and that would be a way to increase the monies available we have to fund Social Security. That seems to me more plausible than trying to have this massive behavioral change that would require people to have more births.
We could also change the income who is able to draw from Social Security, so we could limit it to people who have lower incomes. We could change the Social Security age at retirement. There are things we could do that would adjust our need for Social Security.
In terms of the labor market, one of the biggest and most obvious solutions, and to be frank, one we've relied on in the United States for a long time, is immigration. Immigrants play a large role in our labor market. They work in a lot of different fields. They are major contributors.
In fact, even undocumented immigrants often pay Social Security taxes, so they're not even drawing out in the system, but they're contributing to it.
Yes. So trad wives are really having a moment over the past few years. It's really taken off due to social media, where young, conventionally attractive women, often white, thin and attractive and middle class, are making a life for themselves or presenting a life in which they are staying home with their children. They are sort of in charge solely of home.
They are working perhaps to have home farms. They are feeding their kids organic food. They are sewing clothes. They are really sort of embracing domesticity. And that's really what the Tradwife moment is about, having clear gender roles where women are in charge of the home and men are in charge of the money and they're the provider and they go out into the world.
And so it does dovetail a lot with this pronatalist movement because most tradwives sort of espouse or align with sort of what we might consider as more conservative ideals.
And so one of the things that's interesting about the pronatalist movement is there's a lot of critique about feminists and working mothers and working women, and that women are spending too much time getting educational, increasing their educational attainment, spending too much time in the labor force.
that they're becoming too picky about the potential partners for whom they would marry and have children with. And so part of the trad wife moment seems to be pushing very specific gender roles and that once women are home, of course, then they would want to have more children and that would increase the birth rate.
There's some current concerns about this, though, is that when people are women are embracing this lifestyle, there's nothing wrong with this lifestyle per se, but it does increase their dependency on their partners, their economic dependency. And so if relationships are not don't work out, this really leaves women financially in trouble. It's especially the case.
And sometimes we see this notion of stay at home girlfriends where there isn't even sort of a legal tie between partners. And that makes it especially precarious for women to engage in.
So there's the Elon Musk tech bro sort of approach to pronatalism. So Elon Musk has said that low fertility is sort of the biggest single threat human civilization is facing. And he seems to be on a personal mission to populate the earth. And this is about using technology to potentially have the best and brightest children
Showing 1–20 of 132 · page 1 of 7
Next →