Economist and author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, Catherine Pakaluk delivered an address entitled, “Pronatalists, Antinatalists: We’re All Malthusians Now.” In it, she made the insightful observation that both anti-natalists and pro-natalists fall into an overly simplistic understanding of fertility choice. In short, each policy position relies on an “more resources into households—more babies out” view of natality. She regards those who hold this view as “default natalists,” who hold the view that to maximize children we should maximize household resources. Ironically, one of the leftist critiques of the Natal Conference from Jacobin goaded attendees that if they really wanted more babies on the planet, then they would advocate for the expansion of the welfare state! Indeed, South Korea and Hungary have done just that, and have very little to show for it.

However, this assumption about child-bearing provides a deterministic view of human behavior that denies deliberate action. Pakaluk recognizes that child-bearing should be viewed as a form of human action. She notes that,

Wherever people can get their hands on the means to reduce births today they seem to do so. Adopting the notion that people fundamentally want to have children forces us into a kind of nonsense position that the freest, wealthiest, most reproductively-enabled people in history have not been able to act on their biological inclination to have children. If having kids is an instinct or a constant inclination of the human animal, we are surely the least functional species on the planet.

She continues,

…it’s vastly more sensible to conclude that having children is an act and a habit for individuals and societies It’s a mode of human excellence governed by the classical account of human action, the rational part of the rational animal. People choose to do a thing because they want its object perceived to them as good.

A Misesian statement if there ever was one! …

Here, it’s vital to recall that technological advancements come from the human mind. This fact raises the question: What conditions would cause both women and men to accept and adopt multiple forms of birth control, from prophylactics, the Pill, and abortion? The use of contraception is an attempt to lower the long-run costs of sexual action and to maximize the short-term benefits—plain and simple. So, what is it that drives shorter-run thinking? High time preference rates. Put even more simply, technological advances don’t come from nowhere. They emerge from human actors who believe that the use of certain means create a preferable state of affairs, given the general conditions of life that surround them, including the prevailing culture.

Moreover, it is the inflation culture which drives shorter time horizons. In such a culture this technological development of modern contraception is eminently rational. Child-bearing and rearing is a deliberate choice, and natality requires longer time horizons and lower time preferences. Such a disposition is less likely to prevail in the inflation culture.