Interesting theory! But wouldn't the steady growth in productivity negate much of the effect of inflation? In real terms, families have been getting richer over the 20th and 21st century.
Still, there's something to your thesis. Seems like bureaucratic overreach and regulation have led to e.g. the housing shortage, but also plausibly a cultural change in values that could behind the birth rate collapse. I think studying more societies like Korea, which has had a massive fertility collapse, could be instructive.
The point is, it’s not about how much stuff or productivity we have. Clearly, we have more than past generations. The problem is the information system (money) sending the wrong signals. That’s why the diabetes analogy fits: the body isn’t short on energy, it just thinks it is. So—paradoxically—the more we have, the more we feel we’re missing. That’s why wealth can lead to either bigger or smaller families, it all depends on whether the system is giving the right signals.
"The Fed's monetary base (M0) and fertility rates show a strong negative correlation (-0.899, p < 0.001) – the kind of relationship you rarely see in social systems." - this is confounded by "point in time". When you have any two time-dependent variables (e.g. stork population and number of babies over time), and the first one goes down and the second one goes up monotonically over a period of time, you get a correlation of -1^C^C a strong negative correlation, and -1 in case they are both linear -- and get "strong evidence" for the theory that storks bring babies.
For more meaningful evidence, one needs to get data over multiple places at the same time. For a start, do countries in East Asia, with particularly low birth rate, print particularly large amounts of money?
Interesting theory! But wouldn't the steady growth in productivity negate much of the effect of inflation? In real terms, families have been getting richer over the 20th and 21st century.
Still, there's something to your thesis. Seems like bureaucratic overreach and regulation have led to e.g. the housing shortage, but also plausibly a cultural change in values that could behind the birth rate collapse. I think studying more societies like Korea, which has had a massive fertility collapse, could be instructive.
The point is, it’s not about how much stuff or productivity we have. Clearly, we have more than past generations. The problem is the information system (money) sending the wrong signals. That’s why the diabetes analogy fits: the body isn’t short on energy, it just thinks it is. So—paradoxically—the more we have, the more we feel we’re missing. That’s why wealth can lead to either bigger or smaller families, it all depends on whether the system is giving the right signals.
"The Fed's monetary base (M0) and fertility rates show a strong negative correlation (-0.899, p < 0.001) – the kind of relationship you rarely see in social systems." - this is confounded by "point in time". When you have any two time-dependent variables (e.g. stork population and number of babies over time), and the first one goes down and the second one goes up monotonically over a period of time, you get a correlation of -1^C^C a strong negative correlation, and -1 in case they are both linear -- and get "strong evidence" for the theory that storks bring babies.
For more meaningful evidence, one needs to get data over multiple places at the same time. For a start, do countries in East Asia, with particularly low birth rate, print particularly large amounts of money?