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.
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Appearances
And even these birth bonuses they're considering, they're not available to everybody. What was neat about the American Rescue Plan is that it wasn't something that was just you got money back at taxes. You got $300 a month if you had a child under age six. And you didn't necessarily have to pay income taxes. They expanded eligibility for it. So it went to everybody.
These new plans they're talking about, they're not going to give them to poor women, to the people who would really need them most. They are, again, trying to say, no, no, only some people should be having kids.
So the country that probably has had the most effective fertility plans is actually probably Israel because it makes IVF really widely available. So when people delay having kids, in part because they're getting education, they're building careers, that does seem to help Israel. But most of these other programs, they're very careful about how they extend them.
So many of these countries, again, don't give the benefits to single women or unmarried women, LGBTQ families. they don't have big impacts. They help a little bit on the margins, but for the cost of them, they are not having big impacts. But the ones that matter most are the things that actually make it easier for people to combine work and family.
So one of the things that people worry about is if we offer, quote unquote, too generous of a social safety net, people won't work. There's not a lot of evidence for that. People generally want to work. When they have kids, they want to work a little bit less. They want to stay home more, which is something we all think that would be great for kids. We know that actually having
Parental leave is great for kids and for bonding, and it's good for both mothers and fathers. But investing in a robust child care infrastructure is really important.
Yeah. So Elon Musk is interesting in the sense that there are a lot of people in the tech world who are good at math and think that makes them good at demography because it's a math-related field, but they don't really understand some of the theories, some of the ways we do modeling and think about this.
So at one point, Musk was projecting something and he had projected us all the way down to zero. And I was like, well, no, that's not Right. But he has this huge influence. And so people are listening to him. So it is important to take him seriously. But some of the stuff he just says, to be honest, is pretty bonkers.
He has this whole thing about C-sections that women should have C-sections because that allows their baby's brains to be bigger than a vaginal birth. And that is just so utterly bonkers. I mean, babies' heads, their skulls are not fully fused for an evolutionary reason to go through the birth canal without, you know, crushing their brains.
And so the idea that we're listening to this guy, I mean, it chills me.
So one of the things that's interesting is that this all has this idea that reproduction is the future and it's the key to everything. And all we have to do is control women. So for me, it's always really hard to separate the arguments about populations from the fact that this is about what women should or should not do and who gets to decide what women do. And so when I think about
low birth rates right now. And what does that mean for the economy? Well, it does mean potentially fewer workers. But then we also have things like technological advance. We're having a whole separate conversation about the meaning of automation and robotics and AI. So maybe we don't need as many workers. And the research really shows that young men, they don't want to have kids right now either.
If we wanted to raise birth rates right now, young people are saying, yeah, I want to have kids. I just can't right now for these reasons. We could try listening to those reasons or we can say, you know, we're going to give you a medal if you have six.
Yeah, great being here.
Sure. So one of the things I think is really interesting about this movement is that there's not been a huge increase in the share of people who say they don't want to have children. Instead, what's really happening is people are still generally saying they want to have kids and they want to have two, maybe three. But they're saying not now.
They are taking parenthood and decisions to have kids really seriously. And so it's They look right now at the future, at their own lives, at the world around them, and they're like, now's not a good time, so maybe later. And they keep making that decision to push it off and push it off because now's not a good time for them.
And then that's how you end up with lower birth rates because some people will find that it is never a good time.
Yes. So one of the things I think gets lost that you brought up is that we have this remarkable decline in teen births and births to women in their early 20s. And that is a good new story in the sense that these are generally births to people who are saying now's not a great time. So they're usually unintended or unplanned pregnancies.
And we have spent years, decades and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars shaming young women, not young parents, but really young women, about having births when they're not ready, when they're too young, when they're not in a stable relationship, and when they're too poor, when they don't have a secure income. And so we told people, you have to wait until you have all these things.
You have to finish school. You have to have a good job. You have to be able to afford to live in a safe neighborhood. You have to be able to pay all your expenses. And you should have a good partner who can also do these things. We've told people to wait. And now we're surprised that they're waiting. And until they have those things.
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