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.
It is the inflation-racked human who looks for and prefers short-term consumption and pleasure. And people swept up in the inflation culture will tend to disregard long-term commitments—the very thing that children require. In the fall of 2023, Guido Hülsmann summed up the inflation culture man succinctly, as “materialist, shortsighted, reductionist, shallow and servile.” These characteristics—when adopted by an entire culture—are certainly less likely to purposefully choose to invest in the long-run care and investment that children need.
Thankfully, Pakaluk has dissuaded her audience from the Malthusian theory of inputs in, children out. Her emphasis on the technology shock of birth control that led to a decline in the demand for children is clear, cogent, and accurate. However, it’s the inflation culture that leads to the uplift of short-termism, and down-grading of the long run, and ultimately to a form of rationality that gives rise to technologies that demonstrate that people throughout the planet have devalued children in light of the other alternatives available to them.
Well, well, well, it looks like having children is an act of rational reasoning and economics! The usual suspects say, ”More resources to families” and their policies are failing miserably to increase birthrates. The author of this article reports on the speech Catherine Pakaluk gave, wherein she said having children is actually and economic act rationally arrived at through cost-benefit analysis and time-preferences. She noted that the low birth rate countries also had high inflation and high time preferences which lead to the lower birthrates. This will be a shocker to the usual suspects in the states because THEY are the drivers of the time-preference and inflation problems in society. When do you think they will change policy to reflect reality more closely?