Believing that you’re pretty enough because you’re already quite pretty and plenty of men want to date you is a common pitfall I see women fall into again and again. I am always trying to set people up and the main reason it doesn’t happen is because the men don’t think the women are pretty enough. Alas, many of the shallow men are worth having.

If you get hotter, you’ll get a better man.

I owe a massive debt to this blog post. I would just tell you to go and read it but

• It’s very long

• It contains a lot of nsfw pictures

• It’s focussed on getting sexier instead of capturing a husband and these are slightly different tasks

• It will hurt your feelings. And I know I’ve spent most of these posts telling you you’re an old maid who should probably give up and settle for the dregs of society or whatever, but I hope that’s all useful and spurs you into action. We don’t need to know all the ways in which you’re genetically predisposed to fall short, you just need to know how to improve.

I’ve distilled here the best advice into a shorter, safe for work blogpost. But if you’re interested in things, then I really recommend it.

Men and women are different

Men and women have different tastes in female beauty. Beauty, fashion, and media aimed at women show a different ideal than those aimed at men. There are some commonalities – both men and women like symmetrical faces, clear skin, and not too much fat. But they have different preferences about curves, youthfulness and clothes.

In general, men like neotenous faces with curvy bodies. A lot of women look at the popularity of Belle Delphine et al’s schtick and think that the men who like her are pedophiles. But liking a cute, young face is part of normal, healthy heterosexuality provided it’s combined with a appreciation for a woman’s body.

It’s the same way Hugh Hefner probably didn’t put bunny ears on the playboy bunnies because he was secretly into bestiality.. The adult woman is a crucial part of the overall package.

This type cute faced, curvaceous body type isn’t very common in TV and film and her look is generally considered to be a sign of poor taste. (For example, in Denmark a buxom mermaid sculpture was removed for being too sexy and therefore unfeminist or something) But I see her all the time in adverts for sexy phone games, my main interaction with the world of male lust.

Body

First, and most importantly, don’t be fat. The medically recommended BMI range, for most body-types, includes weights that many men consider too fat to be sexy.

Losing weight is easy now. You can either starve yourself with willpower or you can starve yourself with chemical assistance. Unless you spend a lot of time at the gym, exercise probably won’t help very much. Currently I control my weight by eating about once a day. I personally enjoy the practice of self control and self monitoring. If dieting isn’t a hobby you enjoy, just go down to your local Novo Nordisk or Chinese peptide retailer and pick up some appetite suppressants. The side effects are limited and it will probably be the soundest financial investment you ever make.

If you’re able to control your weight, the next thing you should decide is what your ideal weight should be. The ideal waist to bust and waist to hip ratio is about 0.61. In measurements that’s about 39:24:39. Close to the measurements of this actress.

This is a very rare body to have naturally but you should try to find the weight at which you have the most extreme ratio. Cuvier than 0.61 is less popular but it is so rare in the real world that if your body can look like Kim Kardashian’s (waist to hip of about 0.55) then you should make it so.

Some people think that rich men like flat chested, narrow hipped women and only poor men like curves. There isn’t a good reason to think this is true, just a handful of bad papers that people really wanted to believe in. I asked my richest friend. He is worth several million, seems to be an adequate husband and father, and prefers implausibly massive tits.

I do find that urbane and sophisticated men like to claim that they are interested in facial beauty and they are largely unmoved by hourglass figures. But, speaking as a person whose cup size fluctuates substantially (D to F) with her menstrual cycle, the evidence suggests that they are not totally unmoved by curves.

So, you need to strike a careful balance. It is very easy to be too skinny or too fat.

How to find your ideal weight

Despite what I’ve said about large breasts, the most important element of being curvy is a small waist. So for most people, in order to find your ideal bust-to-waist-to-hip ratio, you should start by losing weight.

Log your weight, bust measurement (around the widest point), waist measurement, and hip measurement. Take your measurements at every half-kilogram or so until you find the weight at which you have the most extreme hourglass that nature will give you. Then maintain as close to that weight as you can manage.

Be careful not to lose too much weight. The weirdness of the modern world is that most women weigh more than their peak beauty but they aspire to weigh less than they should. Once you’ve realised that your weight is something you can control, do not overshoot it to fulfill the female beauty standard. You want to look like a pin up doll not a runway model.

Thighs and bellies are confusing. Men do have preferences here. The ideal is thick thighs, a thigh gap, a soft and almost-but-not-quite-flat stomach, no visible muscle, thin arms and visible collar bones. That’s too much information and your body probably can’t deliver all of those things at the same time. Just chase the hourglass and dismiss the rest as noise.

For some women the best weight may be quite low if you’re prone to gaining weight on your stomach or face. Others will gain mostly in their thighs and bum, which means a bit more fat will be optimal.

Exercise can help a little. Provided you have a little softness, you probably won’t develop visible muscle. Core and glutes exercises will make you more hourglass, so will some shoulder and back work outs. If you’re hoping to exercise your way to an hourglass figure, check out what the bodybuilding girls do for the bikini division. So long as you maintain a feminine body fat percentage, you’re in no danger of looking as grotesque as them.

Face

While people agree on general rankings of faces, there is a lot of disagreement about which faces are the most beautiful. For your body, I recommend everyone get as hourglass as they can, but for your face you should be happy with the face you’ve been given and learn to emphasise what’s striking about your own features.

Here is a collage of images that men sent in when asked for faces they found particularly attractive.

In general, women prefer faces that are much more angular and contoured than the typical male preference. Every other week there’s another celebrity who got her buccal fat removed and all the men on Twitter screech about how this proves that Hollywood hates them.

The first goal of face-maxxing should be improving your skin. The problem with skincare is that it’s a market of snake oil and lemons, so it’s very difficult to tell what’s going to actually improve your skin and what’s just an expensive chore. My rough heuristic is: if a doctor won’t prescribe it, it probably won’t stop you from getting spots. But lots of doctors will give you topical antibiotics if you’re a skilled navigator of bureaucracies.

For aging, the best medicine is prevention. Stay out of the sun and wear SPF every day. I’m skeptical that topical retinol can get through your skin barrier but, unless you’re pregnant, it’s basically harmless to try. What’s one pointless and expensive chore?

Two of my friends swear by Skin and Me which can get you topical antibiotics and prescription retinols without the trouble of going to the doctor. Referral code here.

If you already have wrinkles you should get Botox and maybe filler. Go to someone who does both and they can give you advice about what’s more suitable for your face. For my older readers, I’ve been quite impressed with current face lift technology.

After that, if you have wonky or discoloured teeth you should fix them. Don’t shy away from braces. Lots of men think they’re cute and then you’ll have straight teeth for life.

Maybe you should consider getting lip filler but I would proceed with caution. I’ve been counting, and I see way more cases of bad lip filler in public than lips that look like they need filler.

Makeup

You should wear makeup every day. Even though everyone will be able to tell that you’re wearing makeup, they will just assume you’re more attractive anyway. The internet is full of makeup tutorials. I don’t need to give you one.

My tip for lazy girls is that makeup shops will offer you a bridal makeup package where they teach you how to do a particular look. They will try to overdo it but you should use it as an opportunity to learn what products do what.

Remember that men like a face that’s soft and youthful.

Men say they like natural makeup. What they actually want is elegant, classy makeup.

• Avoid heavily contoured looks. Angular faces and sharp cheek bones are for the female gaze and they can often look clownish in real life.

• Don’t overpluck your eyebrows. You want them to look thick and natural. You might want to fill them in.

• Some highlighter will give you a moist and dewy look

• Lipstick, mascara, eyeliner and blush are all a safe bet.

Glasses

Ditch your glasses. I used to think that glasses were beauty-enhancing for most women because they increase the symmetry of your face and give the illusion of bigger eyes. But men seem to actually like looking at women’s faces. Unless you have very small eyes or a 1 in 100 level asymmetric face, you’re better off without.

If you need eye correction, the sexiest thing is to wear contacts most of the time and to save your glasses for when you’re reading. It adds variety and gives you a sexy extra look in private.

Hair

Most natural hair and eye colours are popular with men but blonde and red are the best. If you’re white and your hair is healthy, you should try either of these colours. If you’re not white, stick with your natural colour.

Length, gloss and thickness are more important than colour. There’s no shame in extensions, Olaplex and expensive shampoo if that’s what you need.

When you wear your hair up, make sure you pull some out to frame your face. You want to pull out more than you think and don’t just take it from the top by your forehead, also pull some from near your ears. This AI girl is a good example. (She also has good makeup)

For your body hair, while some guys like a bush, it’s safer to be hairless. The men who don’t like pubic hair really don’t like it while the men who like a bush don’t seem to feel strongly. By default, remove your pubic, leg and armpit hair and, if it’s visible, your arm and face hair too.

Beauty don’ts.

Here are some things that you shouldn’t do.

• Do not remove your buccal fat. Women like cheekbones way more than men do.

• Don’t get tattoos.

• Don’t tan. It causes wrinkles and codes as common. Wear SPF every day and wear hats on sunny days. Tan lines are ugly in the same way tattoos are ugly.

• Keep your nails short and natural looking. If you really want to paint your nails, go with a light pink. But, if you’re following all my advice, you should be too bored of primping to add a pointless primp. Definitely do not walk around with chipped nail polish or gel nails that have half grown off.

• Don’t thin your eyebrows.

• Don’t cut your hair short.

• Don’t dye your hair an unnatural colour. My one exception is blonde. If you’re white, you can go blonder than is natural. And, if you’re of a race that wouldn’t usually be blonde, you can try it if you really want to. But proceed with caution. Blonde can be very taxing on your hair’s health.

• Don’t get a breast reduction no matter how large and painful they are.

Plastic surgery

If you’re seriously considering plastic surgery, you’ll get the most out of boob job. It costs about the same amount as egg freezing. I’m not sure which increases your odds of having children more.

Across popular plastic surgeries, people report the highest long-term satisfaction with boob jobs (followed by other body-based alterations like abdominoplasty and liposuction) and the lowest satisfaction with nose jobs. This makes sense if men largely prefer one kind of body but lots of different faces.

I’m on the fence about recommending boob jobs but it’s probably one of the places where someone really serious about finding a husband can get some alpha and outcompete the casuals. If you’re willing to go that far, then you shouldn’t be too squeamish to read Dispelling Beauty Lies. Sanilac has a lot of advice on how to choose the right implant size for you.

I would like to emphasise four things before you go full steam ahead.

• Don’t get a boob job until you’ve found and stuck with your ideal weight. What looks good on your frame will change depending on how much body fat you have. The meta study that finds that people are generally satisfied with boob jobs also finds that people with higher BMIs are overall less satisfied with plastic surgery.

• Don’t get a small boob job. Bigger implants carry just as much risk as small ones. I think people get small boob jobs because they think you can fool people but most people, especially people interested in boobs — i.e. your target market — will notice.

• If you get a boob job you are risking rupture, nipple insensitivity and problems breastfeeding. The odds aren’t high but they’re not so low you can dismiss them. About 1 in 20 women with breast augmentation will have some kind of problem. Do your research and find a good surgeon. Do not cheap out.

• Don’t do something that will make you resent your future husband. If your baby has trouble latching because of your implant, will you blame him?

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Getting sexier is the most important thing you can do for your husband hunt. Fortunately, you’re not a man. Men are stuck with the height God gave them and it’s the most important factor in their physical attractiveness.

Most women will be considered attractive if they are skinny with long hair and clear skin. All three of those things are totally within your control.

While men will say they like things to be natural, nine times out of ten they prefer unnatural results delivered in a classy way. It’s better to be a beautiful woman who needs GLP-1s, hair extensions and 37 beauty products than it is to be a mid low maintenance girlfriend.

Last week I talked about how I think sparks are overrated. I think people lose a lot of potential matches because they’re pursuing the romance novel version of their life instead of the arranged marriage version of their life.

That raises an important question. If not romance, what should you be looking for?

For the uninitiated, arbitrage is a concept in finance and economics where you take advantage of a difference in prices between two markets. If you found that your local supermarket was selling jars of miso tasty for a few pounds less than the farmers market, and you had some free time, you could buy a bunch of miso tasty, set up a stall, and sell them for a tidy profit. That would be an arbitrage play and it happens all the time in the economy.

Dating can be thought of as a game of arbitrage. There are some markets where your value is going to be higher than others.

For example, in the British Effective Altruist scene, there are more men than women. Effective Altruists like to date other Effective Altruists, so a woman who is mid in the general market can be quite the catch in this particular sub community. The Soho Reading Sessions are apparently a great place to meet ‘The most beautiful women you’ve ever seen – and 20 of the weirdest men’, if that’s the sort of thing that appeals to you.

Similarly, you hear a lot about the phenomenon of White Male Asian Female couples. I think this happens because Asian women don’t mind dorkiness and sometimes find men from their own country to be quite sexist. The dorky white men, on the other hand, find women who don’t meet the insanely specific Asian beauty standards to be very beautiful despite their unbotoxed traps. That’s arbitrage!

You can improve your league. But you should also be thinking about opportunities for arbitrage. What are your stand out traits? Who are you more valuable to? What do you want that other people don’t care about? What do other people want that you could take or leave?

Here are my top 11 tips for dating market arbitrage.

1. Avoid sexual dominance

I am suspicious of dominant men. Aella writes about how being into BDSM is basically a sexual orientation. She’s probably right.

Despite what the Bible says, male and female sexuality aren’t perfect complements of each other. Men don’t really want to dominate women as much as women want to be dominated. When I talk to men who have a lot of sex they complain that women treat them like a handyman; asking them for a limitless supply of debauched acts. They dutifully choke, slap and restrain as commanded. It’s the ticket price of repeated admission to a lady’s boudoir.

I do know a small number of men who really do enjoy erotic violence and they aren’t the nicest people. Here are some very anonymized anecdotes about them. (Remember, gossip more and watch less TV.)

• A man who shouts at interns

• Another man who shouts at junior staff members

• A man who cheats on his wife publicly and I’ve seen him belittle her

• A man who cheated on his girlfriend and bullied her into an eating disorder and plastic surgery

• A man who dumped a perfectly nice girl to become poly

• A 24/7 sub-dom relationship that the woman, afterwards, considered to be abuse.

I think violent temperaments in the bedroom are correlated with violent temperaments in general. I think it’s fine to want a man who can competently carry out tasks and wants to give you the sex you’re looking for. But give up on the men who really want it.

2. Think of the children

You’re mostly thinking about what traits you want in a husband. You should think about what traits you want for your children.

Mostly the traits I want in my children are very similar to traits that are valuable on the dating market. You probably have similar preferences, so this isn’t super useful. Fundamentally I want my whole family to be healthy, intelligent and likable so there’s not much I can gain there.

There are traits that are more important to me in my children than they are in a partner. It’s more important to me that they are healthy, confident, curious, and driven. It’s less important to me that they be romantic, attractive, or zen.

This is yet another reason to give up on dominance. You might want a kinky husband with a high sex drive, but you would probably prefer to have vanilla children.

3. Looks

Chasing good looking men is a sign of poor time preference. If you get married in your 30s, you will spend about half of your relationship as elderly people.

This advice is the oldest in the book and yet, no one follows it. Sell looks, buy character. When you do buy looks, buy the looks that are associated with good health – like weight, skin and symmetry. Avoid looks that are just good fortune.

I guess if you really want pretty children, find someone whose features would look good with yours.

4. Height

Women love tall men. Even I, as a certified short woman, had the audacity to prefer tall men.

If you’re like me, I’m guessing what you want from height is actually size. I want to feel petite and feminine and height is the easiest way to achieve this. But broad shouldered short men also do the job and the apps don’t yet let you filter on shoulder breadth (yet). Keen observers of male physiques can use this to their advantage.

5. Age

I talked about age a couple of posts ago but you might not have read it. Women’s preference for age is stronger than men’s preference for youth. You should date younger than you’re inclined to.

6. Money

I think young and single people underrate money and overrate status. I didn’t really care about money, except insofar as it was a proxy for status, until I was in a serious relationship thinking seriously about having a family.

Don’t date men with cool, high status jobs. Date men who earn a lot of money doing something boring. Ideally, date a man who does something that lots of women find a bit evil. Go for men in insurance, oil, finance, and logistics. Reject men in the arts.

The other money arbitrage, especially when combined with the youth arbitrage, is you should look for a future rich man. I snapped up my lovely husband when he was a phd student. Other excellent husbands can be found at law school, on grad schemes, or the early stages of start ups.

And, provided he is smart and hard working, you can take an unambitious man and turn him into a high earner. Lots of men also don’t realize they want money until they have a wife and child to spend it on.

7. Hobbies

Shared hobbies and interests aren’t that important and a curse to the people who crave them. Most hobbies and interests are incredibly gendered. In my world, the boys like playing map-based video games, talking about tech and geopolitics, and watching sports. The girls prefer organized fun, arguing about domestic policy, and reading classical literature.

Obviously, my world is hyper selected. We all like trains and Japan. But there are still clear gendered interests. If you have an interest that men really like, you should lean into it. Probably the sexiest thing you could get into is war. Men love talking about war.

But for most of us, our hobbies are niche and feminine. It’s just not that important to share them with your man. I recommend getting into explaining things. Explaining something to a smart and interested person is one of the greatest pleasures in life. It’s so pleasurable I had to ban myself from doing it on dates.

I love coming home to my husband and telling him all about all the new things Samuel has taught me about urbanism. He then tells me all about AI and chemistry and we both have a richer understanding of the world.

8. Politics or ‘values’

I think shared politics/ideology/values are the most overrated thing on the market. If you’re interested in things and stuff, it can be very limiting. Any way in which you stray from the orthodoxy du jour will alienate some part of the market.

It doesn’t help that, like hobbies, politics and values are also very gendered.

I’ve changed my mind so much over time. When I was young and compassionate, I was a woke communist. But, because I have an inherent love of systems, I learned about markets and became libertarianish. Then, because I was interested in rationalism, I learned about Moloch and status games, and became a market-oriented centrist with progress characteristics.

The world will change. I will change.

I think a shared worldview can be a very unstable foundation to build a marriage on. Had I locked in a libertarianish man when I was 25, and had that been the foundation of our relationship, I think he would feel quite betrayed by the ways in which I’ve changed.

Instead, I found a person whose intellect I respect. We disagree recreationally but mostly defer to the other’s domains of expertise.

You will never agree wholeheartedly with another person on how to run your life. And if you’re thoughtful, you won’t agree with your past self about it either. I have a friend who turned her husband vegan and then started eating fish. She also became religious and much less woke.

Fortunately, they were held together by mutual esteem, not shared values.

You will have different intuitions about managing money, whether children should use screens, how often to tidy up, how to plan a holiday, whether and what to give to charities etc. Successfully building a life with other people involves learning how to navigate these incompatibilities.

My caveat here is there are some things that just won’t work.

1. Don’t date a person who thinks you’re stupid or evil.

2. Some differences in belief are fundamental to the way your lives together will be structured. Preferred levels of redistribution aren’t going to make or break your marriage but opinions on stay-at-home mothers might.

3. Don’t marry someone who has a trump card that supersedes all your values. I think this can be a source of tension in relationships where one person has religious mandates and the other person has ‘preferences’.

9. Good husbands aren’t always good boyfriends

There are some traits that are really great in boyfriends but bad in husbands. For example, it’s fun to date men who will take you on lavish dates and it’s bad to be with a spend-thrift husband.

Similarly, some people are very generous and accommodating of other people. This can be nice if you’re the person who is being accommodated but when you’re married you might be expected to do the accommodating. My dad is a very generous man. He’s incredibly generous to me but, unfortunately, he’s also very generous with other people. I remember him giving my toys away to other children!

A man with a tidy house is nice, but how much tidying do you want to do when you live together? I once dated a man who had a glass table that he wiped every day. Horrendous. I couldn’t live like that. We burned a hole in our white dining table during our housewarming party.

Cultivation, stylish outfits, and a good physique are all very nice in a boyfriend. But do you want a husband who goes to the gym all the time? Do you want him to obsess over the latest Drake’s sample sale? Do you want to be in charge of the house’s interior design or will you have to bow to his aesthetic preferences?

When you date a man, he is a stranger to you. His behavior is some indication of how he will treat his wife and it demonstrates what virtues come naturally to him, but it’s a better indication of how he treats strangers.

10. The apps

People have all kinds of hang ups about the apps. I won’t litigate those here but I will say that people who don’t use the apps are hard to meet. That means the price is less likely to reflect the market value.

If you run into an appless man, you can buy him at a discount.

Some men haven’t put much thought into their profiles. Often, I think they feel too squeamish to show their friends so they don’t get good advice. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Look for men with bad profiles but the fundamentals look promising.

11. Date your friends

The biggest tragedy of dating is that it’s really easy to weed out people for shallow and materialistic reasons. It’s really hard to find out who has a heart of gold, who treats people right, and who is going to be a really dedicated and committed life partner.

One of the great things about having friends, especially friends you’ve known for a long time, is that you know the content of their character. I have a few friends who are kind of weird, embarrassing and low status but they are really good people. Sure, they would be weird and embarrassing in a way that would embarrass you at parties but, except for that, they would make damn good husbands.

Ultimately, you want to be in a relationship where you both value each other much more than any likely replacement. You want to find someone who values what’s special about you and wonders at how they got so damn lucky.

The main way to achieve that is through cultivating healthy thought patterns. The halo effect is real and you can use it to your advantage.

The second best way is to think about how to sell yourself. My tips here are very general because you are legion. You will have all kinds of specific traits that some other people are going to really want.

I knew what was special about me is my emotional control and lack of neediness. Most men have a slight preference for a bit of bpd but I assumed that extreme hard-headedness was also undersupplied and I leant into it.

Are you ambitious? Incredibly knowledgeable about trains? Kind of right wing? Very organized? An excellent cook? Find a way to show that off.

What I’m trying to say is that we, as a society, are missing out on the ability to accuse someone of Witchcraft and be taken seriously.

What happened to these people? When was the last time you saw somebody called Hiram invent five different crazy machines, found a new religion, and have twelve children who he named after Greek nymphs?

– Scott Alexander, Puritan Spotting

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman classifies modes of thought into System 1 for fast and instinctive thinking and System 2 for deliberate and logical thinking. Provocateur Camille Paglia draws a distinction between Western society’s two modes of thought: the hyperverbal “ascetic Palestinian creed” and pagan aestheticism. Canonical internet text The Nerd as the Norm says that people exist on a spectrum from nerds (people who are literal, unappreciative of aesthetics and like to trade information) to wambs (people sensitive to social norms, have a keen aesthetic sense and consider conversations to be about people not trading information).

Over and over, we rediscover the fact that we reason in two ways; a mode that is logical, specialised for algebra and reasoning A therefore B and therefore C, and another mode that is intuitive and is for saying, “That person seems untrustworthy” or “Monochrome is stylish”.

If you’re going to use your logical mind on a problem, you’ll do research and think seriously about it. If you want to use your intuitive sense on a problem you will, LLM like, gather data and stories, ruminate, and hope that you can sleep on it and generate an answer that “feels right”.

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Anyway, I was talking about witchcraft. I would like to point to things that are hijacking your intuitive sense-making and call it witchcraft. There’s lots of it in our fallen world. I think, for example, it’s kind of witchy to fill adverts with attractive people. I think people who do those classic charisma tricks like making too much eye contact or using subtle casual touch are witches. I think, and this is the most puritan thing about me, playing music at church is witchcraft. Choral music is very emotive and you shouldn’t use it to trick people into believing in God. But the worst offenders are Hollywood because they have the most reach.

Everyone gossips too little and consumes too much fiction. For every real life story of love you’ve heard, you have watched ten times as many fictional examples and they are ten times more emotionally potent. Every day you’re watching beautiful people fall in love on Netflix or listening to your latest enemies to lovers audiobook, and your intuitive brain is registering it as real information about the real world.

My chronically single friends are rarely chronically single because eligible bachelors don’t like them. Their problem is that they don’t feel things for the eligible bachelors who like them. It’s not usually because they’re trying desperately to get someone out of their league — that’s been ground out of them by now. But they’re struggling to feel anything for the nice enough people they’re going on dates with.

Many intelligent people are prone to over relying on their logical brain for things that you can’t master without honing intuitive judgments – they only cook from recipes , they try to dress themselves with colour systems and kibbe body types. They won’t unclench and let a bit of intuitive judgement guide them.

And then suddenly these totally nerdy, totally System 2 people, want to use their limp, under-exercised System 1 brain on the most important problem in their life. That would be bad enough on its own. But considering how few examples of good relationships we get to live through, it’s probably one the main places you should not use intuition.

Why is fictional romance so bad? Isn’t good art meant to tell truths we can’t articulate in other ways or something?

It’s because conventions of the genre, written to increase entertainment value, don’t map very well to real life. So for a romance story the plot goes something like:

Two people meet. They have a moment of chemistry – maybe several moments of chemistry – and they are drawn to one another. Often there is some plausible deniability so they are both uncertain about the other’s feelings. There is some kind of obstacle to their relationship. It can be internal, like they think they hate each other, or it can be external, like their parents are trying to keep them apart. Usually this obstacle is overcome but maybe one of them will die.

In real life, normal, healthy couples follow a plot more like:

Two people meet. They find each other attractive and they kind of like talking to each other. Perhaps there could be something there but they barely know each other. They clearly communicate that they’re kind of interested and agree to keep meeting up. Little by little, two people who barely know each other, start to remedy that. Over the course of many evenings, their feelings deepen until they realise, one day, that they’re in love.

Mammals love intermittent rewards. The story from a romance novel is compelling because it hijacks the part of your psyche that seeks inconsistent and uncertain reward. It describes a situation that will create a more immediate, more spark-like connection. You can’t yearn for someone who communicates their intentions clearly.

This is why the red pill teaches men to neg, why women fall for lovebombing fuckboys, why men fall for hot-and-cold BPD girls, and why you can have more butterflies for a man you make eye contact with on your commute than you do for the perfect on paper guy your friend set you up with.

But that passion is not necessarily a sign that your relationship might be good. In the real world, your paramour probably isn’t a fairy king who has kidnapped you against your will or a vampire who has to wrestle with his desire to drink your blood. In the real world (or, as I reflect upon these examples, in the fictional world too), the obstacles that create yearning are anti-correlated with domestic felicity.

Socially savvy people know what cheap tricks they can use to induce that feeling in another person (no, I’m not teaching you) and they are not the tools of good, stable people.

Of course, this isn’t the only reason you shouldn’t trust your gut. There are others.

1. Your natural system for being attracted to people evolved in a very different environment to the one we find ourselves in. The sexiest men often have traits that make them very good cavemen but kind of sub-par actuaries.

2. It’s a very difficult area to study, lots of arranged marriages allow the couple to court and lots of love matches in arranged-marriage cultures are more arranged than Western dating, but most evidence finds little difference between the quality of arranged marriages and love matches. Tentatively, I think this suggests that initial attraction has little to do with long-term love.

   
   If you’re not a sociopath and your partner isn’t a sociopath, if you have similar values, if you’re building a life together and having regular sex, you probably will grow to love each other. Most cultures don’t let women court freely and yet humans evolved the capacity for romantic love anyway.

3. Lots of you are perverts. Depending on how you measure it, somewhere between a large minority to a small majority of women are interested in being dominated. You might be seeking subliminal signs that a man is dominant. Considering the top shortage – if you could take it or leave it, or only slightly prefer it – you’re better off abandoning dominance.

4. People seem to look for strange and random points of similarity. One of my friends has an ex-boyfriend who had an eerily similar joke delivery-style to her. As far as I can tell, she’s never seriously fancied anyone since. While a shared sense of humour is nice, no one would say it’s the only important thing.

5. Some say you’re “stickier” when you’re younger and less experienced. They say virgins can fall deeply and irrationally for the first people they have sex with. As you get older you become desensitised to oxytocin, you’ll get more stuck in your ways, develop taste, guard your heart, and have less time to spend mooning over someone. Sparks probably get rarer with age. The wall is bad enough already without letting age shrink your options further.

Overall, using your intuition is massively overrated in romance. You’ve been trained on a lot of bad data and it’s made you go haywire. You’re better off courting like you’re arranging your own marriage, not like you’re starring in a rom com.

If you understand the phenomenon, you can minimise its impact on you.

Looks

It is true that people, in general, get less attractive as they get older.

But, speaking broadly, we find it quite difficult to tell how old people are and overindex on cues that don’t change throughout adulthood like big eyes or height. I think this is, in no small part, because we look much younger and more attractive than people of previous generations. Provided you’re successfully combatting wrinkles, grey hairs, and weight gain, how old you look will depend mostly on how you dress and carry yourself.

If you were sexy at 20, you will probably still be attractive in your 30s. I would expect a typical 8 to drop to a 7 over the course of ten years. Nothing devastating should happen to your appearance over this time. If you’ve only just started to think seriously about your looks, you might even hit your attractiveness peak in your 30s. (More on how you can do this later.)

All the good ones get taken

Every day that passes, eligible bachelors in your age range start dating the women they are going to marry. Men get spit back out onto the apps for three main reasons.

1. There’s something wrong with him

2. There’s something wrong with her

3. Bad luck

As you get older the men who are attractive, want to get married, and don’t have ruinous personality problems get snapped up. What’s left are the men who can’t get girlfriends, aren’t interested in serious dating, and/or have been serially rejected by women after getting into relationships with them. Obviously lots of single older men are still marriage-worthy. Maybe they’ve had a bit of a glow up, matured over the years, or just had some unfortunate sources of incompatibility. But the more time passes, the less likely this becomes. My gut instinct is that it’s not worth wasting your time on men older than 35.

For a while the market gets better as men who aren’t yet ready for marriage become ready and learn to clean their rooms. But then it gets worse as functional and commitment-minded people exit forever.

The problem described above should harm men and women symmetrically. The reverse logic should also hold too. The women left in the dating market in their 30s are also, presumably, less able to get boyfriends, less interested in marriage, and/or have been serially rejected by boyfriends.

Unfortunately there are lots of factors which make this asymmetric.

1. While I think the looks-based analysis of the wall is overrated, there is still some truth to it. Women can expect their physical beauty to wane faster than a man’s.

2. Men who want children will sometimes reject older women who they find attractive because they are worried about her fertility – especially if they want several children. A woman will rarely reject a man for being too old, regardless of whether he harbours a ruinous mutational load in his loins.

3. Women who don’t want relationships don’t bother meeting men and stringing them along. If they want to use a man for sex, they can usually engage him without fuss. Men, on the other hand, when seeking short-term dalliances, will often pretend at being a serious suitor and thus, waste a good woman’s time.

4. A bad man is much more ruinous than a bad woman. So the men who get spat out into serial monogamy are more likely to carry a dangerous downside risk.

The most important factor, that reinforces all the above, is that across societies men usually prefer to date women who are younger and women prefer to date men who are older. So as a woman gets older, her potential market shrinks and, as a man gets older, his potential market grows.

Speaking in very general terms, a woman who is in her early twenties usually has all the men her age available to her as well as all the single men in their thirties too. Whereas a woman in her thirties can usually only date men in their thirties – selection effects and all. A man in his early twenties can usually only date women his age – but that’s okay, they haven’t been so adversely selected yet – and when he’s in his thirties he can still date the women in their twenties, as well as the increasingly desperate thirty-somethings.

Women experience this as a sharp decrease in their sexual market value while men, even though they are also getting uglier, will feel as if they’re getting sexier.

I ran a small poll in my first post. It totally confirms my preconceived notions. We, as a culture, love to blame men for their perversions. I think this is why we blame the wall on their shallow desire for youth. But, in my experience, a man is perfectly happy to date women a little older than him, but a woman ‘gets the ick’ if her paramour is younger than her.

In my poll, single men were on average willing to date six years younger and three years older. A small handful of men were willing to date more years older than younger, but they were typically 20 year olds who didn’t want to date under 18s. Some of the older men didn’t even want to date women as old as they were – I assume because they want children.

The women were the opposite of the men but more extreme. The average woman was willing to date two years younger and eight years older. In fact, there were more women who were willing to date 10+ years older than 3 years younger.

Sexual market value is not marriage market value

It’s very difficult to know what your league is.

I can’t see myself accurately in the mirror. I go from thinking I’m a beautiful goddess to thinking I’m a horrible bin raccoon. People say things from time to time but you can’t trust them. My husband once said I’m the most beautiful woman he’s ever met and he definitely can’t be trusted. (He also once said that I look like Julia Roberts, which I think meant “I find Julia Roberts attractive.”)

My friends aren’t going to tell me anything useful. And even when they are unusually candid it’s difficult to assess taste versus objective value on the market.

Sometimes you can learn general rules about beauty and assess yourself based on those. But people are always trying trying to sell you snake oil, so it can feel like playing with astrological charts.

Most women end up defaulting to assessing their attractiveness by working out how many people find them attractive and comparing that yardstick to other women they know. This is a very confusing signal with a lot of dishonesty and noise, but it probably is the best you have.

But, I think this signal leads you to overrate your value on the marriage market place.

First, you can probably sleep with a man who is out of your league but you can’t lock him down. That man will probably pretend to have honourable intentions and, especially if you reject him, you may never know what he was after.

Second, your marriage market value will decline quite quickly. You might be assessing people based on your league a couple of years ago rather than your current one. If you’re too slow to update you might throw away your best option.

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Age informed tricks and tips

So, what is to be done?

My best advice is that you shouldn’t waste time. If you’re young, don’t focus on work or having fun. Start dating for marriage now. You’ll have an easier time finding a great man.

The best age of man to target is probably younger than you think. I think you should focus your attention on men in their mid twenties. In my poll, the average age of men in relationships was 31, two years older than the single men, but they met their wives/girlfriends at a median age of 25. I recommend any woman 27 and younger to aim for people in their mid twenties. They are probably not thinking about marriage yet but they will be after a couple of years. And they haven’t hit their peak sexual market value yet so you can buy a great guy at a discount.

If you’re older and want to have children soon, you don’t want to be in a relationship for a few years before you get married. So you are looking for the kind of man who already knows he’s looking for a wife. Ideally you want a man whose friends are starting to get married. I wouldn’t risk dating a man under 28 unless you have evidence that his social group marries young. In person this is easy to find out. Presumably, you’re meeting because you have mutual friends.

Online there are clues you can pick up on. Do any of his pictures show him as someone’s best man? Is he holding a baby? Is he religious?

If you don’t get any of these clues, I would aim for 30. After that milestone birthday, he’s probably thinking about being a serious grown up.

When possible, you should also focus on men who haven’t been single for very long. Forget silly notions about rebounds. Snap up your newly single friends ASAP. Don’t wait for a respectful mourning period.

After some time on the apps, men pick up tricks for optimising their profile and they work out that their league has improved since they were last hawking their wares. Look for clues that the profile is bad but the man is good. If he has a high IQ job and his prompts are generic, he probably isn’t dumb, just poorly versed in Hinge.

If his pictures look like they were taken by or with an ex-girlfriend that probably means he has a recent ex-girlfriend and other women are arbitrarily ruling him out. What better arbitrage could there be?

Thanks to everyone who took my survey! I’m donating £200 to Give Directly on behalf of an anonymous responder.

Eighty six people filled it out. If I get about a hundred more responses, I will make some nice data viz but at current numbers it looks a bit lumpy.

Take my survey here

I promise that I will deliver useful advice soon. But first, I must give you a blackpill.

In the era of good sitcoms, probably when most of our parents were hooking up, you could just accidentally fall into a marriage. If you were born in 1960, over three quarters of your peers would be married by 30. Only about 15% of people should expect to be terminally unwed.

This is the world of Sex in the City and Friends and it’s totally lost to us.

One of my friends jokes that if you ask anyone how their parents got together, the story sounds insane. This is certainly true of my parents. They met in the spring of 1995, they were engaged by the summer, married in the winter, and I was born nine and a half months after that. It all worked out alright.

Marriage rates have fallen so quickly that you can assume that if you’re a single woman today, you probably won’t get married at all.

If you were born in 1960, you had an 85% chance of getting married by the time you turned 40.1 This fell by over 10% for women born in 1970 and by over 10% again for women born in 1980. At every age from 25 on, women born in 1990 were about 10% less likely to be married than women from 1980. So if 62% of women born in 1980 were married by 40 what does that leave me to predict …..

My guess is that only half of people born in 1990 will end up married. For every year after 1990, knock another percentage point off.

This means that for literally every age cohort, if you aren’t already married, you probably won’t get married.

So let’s say you’re about 30. About a quarter of your friends are already married. Only another fifth or so are going to get married. Look around and take stock. Are you in the most-marrying fifth? (Or quarter of remaining unmarried women) Are you going to beat all the girls with boyfriends and fiancées?

I’m not writing this to upset you. I’m writing this to light a fire in you.

The future steps of this guide are going to recommend that you put in some serious effort. I’m going to tell you lose some weight, go on a lot of dates, and even do some maths.

I hope I’ve convinced you that you want a husband. That alone shouldn’t persuade you to put in lots of work. You probably also want a steady flow of oxygen to your lungs but only in dire emergencies do you expend any effort to ensure this happens.

This is a dire emergency. Something has gone horribly wrong with our matching technology and/or our settling-down technology. Dropping a percentage point every year, we have been frogboiled into accepting this as normal. This is actually a disaster, the likes of which our civilisation has never seen. I think you should take seriously the idea that this might not work out for you and respond accordingly.’

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“I’m not an average person so I don’t have average odds of getting married”

Lots of people on the internet seem to think their very high IQ social circle is an island protected from general trends, as though your A* in GSCE Geography protects you from spinsterhood, just as your careers counsellor promised. Some people are one bad customer service interaction away from thinking that tradies can’t understand hypothetical questions. Honestly, it’s a wonder you people get into Ubers.

I expect my audience to be pulled in opposite directions. High education levels increase your odds of getting married, mostly by protecting you from intractable unwed cohabitation. But city living and faithlessness are a bad combination for the nuptially inclined.

My friend and colleague Will Hewitt has vibecoded an excellent calculator. Claude uses data beyond our ONS but is just as pessimistic about the numbers as I am.

Have a play around (if you dare).

Calculate your odds

Help me gather empirical data to improve future episodes. Fill out the survey. I will give one randomly selected person £100 or give £200 to an effective charity of their choice.

Appendix for sociopaths

If you want some proper motivation, get out a pen and paper and do something a bit fucked up. Write down the names and relationship statuses of all your friends and work out where you fall on the distribution for odd of getting married.

I just wrote down the names of all my female friends who are roughly my age. Of thirty eight women, eleven are married, two are engaged, thirteen are in relationships and twelve are single.

It we were nationally representative, I should expect about 45% to end up married, 20% long-term cohabiting and 35% single. But actually we’re an unusually educated, south asian, and religious group, so I’m going to say it’s more like 55%, 5% and 40%.

My napkin maths tells me that about twenty one are going to end up married, two in long-term cohabitations and the rest single. I think the two who are engaged are definitely going to get married and, knowing the people involved, I think that six of those couples are headed marriage-ward too. (I’ve even been privy to some exciting ring chat.) I have my suspicions about who the two unmarried cohabiters will be.

Of the seventeen remaining, only two more will make it down the aisle. If I were single now, I would look at my friends and internalise the fact that there a lot of beautiful and interesting women who are going to end up single. And I would be trying my best to be more cunning, diligent, and beautiful than them.

Here is a picture of us at our wedding.

To maintain his impeccable SEO I’m not going to name him but here’s his CV.

• Oxbridge graduate

• Successful career with a very good long-term earning potential

• Lots of friends, both men and women

• A good relationship with his family

• A good person – thoughtful, kind, has a backbone, seeks to improve the world in measurable ways

• Has good relationship skills e.g. he disagrees well, controls his emotions etc

• Wants children

• 6ft1, in shape, handsome

• Reads books and is cultured and knowledgeable about a range of things

• Has hobbies – walking (or ‘hiking’ in American English), plays several instruments, cooks, climbs)

• No mental or physical health problems

• All his grandparents lived into their 90s (other people don’t think this is important but they should)

• Good social skills that work in a range of settings

• Demonstrates the kind of masculine virtue that people are aiming for when they talk about ‘getting the ick’

• Romantic, considerate, kind

I basically found someone who has the full checklist of things that most people want. Though I am a catch, I’m not as obviously desirable as my husband is. And, as we all know, there are way more university educated women than men. It’s tough out there. So how did I find him?

I had a very methodical process. My main skill is that I think strategically about things other people do on autopilot. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this question. It is, after all, the most important thing I will ever do in my life.

This is a multi part series. I’ve written most of it and I plan to publish weekly. This is the list I’ve roughly drafted so far, but I expect it to change in response to comments.

• You should want a husband

• You’ll probably die alone

• The wall is real but not for the reasons you think

• Don’t trust your gut

• A mathematical approach to settling

• In defence of settling

• 7 Rules for using the Aria method

• What traits should you look for

• How to be prettier

• How to dress

• How to act sexier

• Men’s preferences are legitimate

• Use the apps. Move to a big city. It’s not the 1990s anymore.

• Design your best dating app profile

• How to give a good first date

• Are you too cooked to fancy anyone?

• Datemaxing motivation

• Make him chase

• How to act wifeable

• Yes, you should be good in bed

• Ambient, low effort sexiness

• The fuckboy plague

• The dating to boyfriend pipeline

• Who should you prioritise

• Dump early dump often

• The boyfriend to husband pipeline

Help me gather empirical data to improve future episodes. Fill out the survey. I will give one randomly selected person £100 or give £200 to an effective charity of their choice.

Part 1: You should want a husband

Finding a spouse should be the number one priority in your life.

The right partner will make every other goal in your life easier to achieve.

If your priority is your career, you will probably be more successful with a well-chosen spouse. In some cases this will be a partner in a similar field and you guys can pass each other networks and gossip. In some cases you may prefer someone who is willing to put their career on the backburner and support you by taking care of everything else in your life.

If you’re aiming for success in politics, or the arts, or you work tirelessly for a really important altruistic cause, then marrying someone with a steady income will make you able to take the risks you need to.

Of course, if you plan on having children, the right partner makes all the difference. Your children are literally half your husband’s and will be full of his DNA. If your husband is attractive but kind of lazy, then your kids will on average be a bit attractive and a bit lazy. If your husband is funny and intelligent but has a mean streak, then your kids will probably be a little like that too.

And while most enterprising women can probably think up a way to get the sperm they need to make a baby, a conscientious pair of hands from a highly invested individual is harder to come by.

Even if you just want hedonic pleasure, you’re probably better off with a spouse than without. Sure, if you’re a socially normal twenty-or-thirty-something, then being carefree and single is pretty great. But, you’ll grow old regardless of whether you get married.

At some point, you’ll stop being hot and single and become an old maid. And you will go on to spend more of your life as an old maid than as a hot and single lady. You should resist the marshmallow and spend the currency of youth on securing happiness in your future. Also married people are happier. People who value hedonism should take this consistent and cross-cultural finding seriously.

As long term trends show that only functional people are deciding to get married and everyone is getting lonelier, we should expect the hedonistic returns to marriage to improve.

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But, this is the wrong way to think about life and I disavow it. Your priorities when you’re young and single are different to what they will be when you’re older. You should expect to value sex and social status less than you do now. As you get older, you should predict that you will want children more than you do now. And you should expect to want more children than the number you end up having.

I’m addressing the small number of people who don’t want to get married because they want to maximise some other value because I understand that way of thinking. At a formative age I read too many books about teenagers who save the world. On some level I believe I should be optimising for one Very Important Thing and anything that doesn’t aid the Very Important Thing is a distraction and any person of strong character would jettison those meaningless distractions in a heartbeat. Some might call it autism. Whatever it is, it is the psychological disposition that draws people to eating disorders and Effective Altruism. (Two things I continue to dabble in from time to time.)

In the general imagination, genius comes with obsessiveness. We think incredibly successful people are also incredibly driven and are willing to sacrifice their personal lives for their success. This is one of the many memes brought to you by the just world fallacy.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Patrick Collison is not just obsessed with payments. He’s happily married, widely read, and strong. Taylor Swift bakes and hangs out for days with her aging parents.

Ironically, the small number of people I know who have dedicated everything in their life to one thing, usually something professional, are weird and unlikeable in ways that affect their professional success. The one time I met an actually successful person whose whole life was about one thing, he was later arrested for fraud. (And he was still weird and unlikeable.)

Diversify your fulfilment. Also, put your savings in an index tracker.

Hardly anyone is better off without a life partner. Maybe 1% of the population. Loads of people, on the other hand, are wrong about themselves and their romantic preferences. Most people learn really crucial things about love as they get older and they try out a few relationships. If you think you’re better off alone, you’re more likely to wrong about yourself than you are to be a freak. Noted asexual freak (complimentary) Scott Alexander is happily married.

“I don’t need a husband, just a boyfriend”

It’s true that you can get basically everything I’ve described from having a long term committed partner. So why do you, in 2026, need a ring?

I talk about finding a husband because I’m talking about finding someone who is committed to you for the rest of your life. Due to the legality of no-fault divorce and a society that will not ostracise people for reneging on their marital vows — marriage is actually just a piece of paper. But, despite that, marriage is doing better than ever.

The world is complicated and you are unpredictable. But! It does have trends! For some reason, the people who decide to get married are better at staying together. Maybe it’s just because marrying-types are more conscientious and actually getting married does nothing. Or maybe it’s because society at large reinforces their relationship in ways that make a meaningful difference. Maybe it’s because the legal faff involved with separation provides just enough friction to hold some couples together. Maybe it’s because, even if you think it’s no big deal when you do it, going back on a promise you made in public is shameful to you. I make no claims about why marriage works, I’m simply observing that it does.

I don’t think you can be so certain that marriage is just a piece of paper that it isn’t worth doing, just in case you’re wrong.

In truth, I suspect many of the people who refuse to get married are quietly maintaining their outside options, they are trying to save face because the person they want to marry is dragging their feet, or despite the outward appearance of felicity, the relationship has serious issues and both parties suspect they are headed for splitsville.

Don’t let the propaganda from these fools con you out of longterm happiness.

We are so fucked

The British state is basically a Ponzi scheme. The theory goes something like this – it’s okay for the Baby Boomers to be net recipients because the economy has been growing. Therefore by allowing Baby Boomers to borrow and let Gen X pick up the tab, we’re effectively redistributing money from a richer group (people born in the 70s) to a poorer group (people born in the 50s).

If we think redistribution is good, why not send money back in time to our ancestors?1

But British productivity growth has been stagnant and birth rates have dropped so now that it’s time for our generation to pick up Gen X’s tab  it’s not looking so great.

If we crudely say that the size of the economy is [Number of workers  *  Productivity],2 if productivity is stagnant and the number of pensioners to support increases, we need lots of new workers to keep standards of living constant.

What I’ve articulated here is probably not novel to any of my readers, but I think it’s good to set the scene.

You thought it was bad? What if it’s even worse?

There’s a new OBR report that’s been making waves.

Based on current policy, this is what the OBR projects is our future.

If nothing changes the OBR says that government spending is going to balloon and government revenues are going to fall slowly from current levels. Basically, if nothing changes, we’re bankrupt.

There are lots of graphs that break down the different elements that have gone into making this prediction. But this one has made the biggest waves.

Anger at immigration has been growing. For several elections the British people have clearly voted for less immigration and politicians have listened, acknowledged their frustration, and delivered yet more immigration.

What people say is that politicians want to cut immigration but unfortunately they also want to keep taxes low and maintain our public services, so they keep them afloat with “cheap labour from abroad.”

I’m sure this is part of the reason immigration levels have stayed high, but there are other shocks as well – for example, we accepted a lot of refugees from Hong Kong and Ukraine. I think there are deeper structural issues too; people from abroad have innovated ways of exploiting loopholes in our system, inflation has increased wages meaning that more people make it over the threshold for different kinds of visas, and our politicians are so incompetent that it’s not clear that even if they really wanted to they could pass the policies needed to cut immigration.

I think the reason this OBR report  has been so exciting is because people from the anti-immigration camp have been told that  immigrants are net contributors so if you want to reduce immigration you’re probably racist and your values aren’t worth making the rest of us poorer for. But meanwhile, it is obvious that post-Brexit the groups of people immigrating here has changed and therefore it would be a mistake to rely on old data for our current conclusions.3

Britain is not alone here. It seems that lots of European countries are experiencing the same economic problems and therefore are experiencing a lot more migration.

The politics of this is great.

I don’t think we should accept immigrants who are going to decrease the quality of life for British citizens. This means I think we should be stricter about accepting dependents.  And for a combination of cultural and economic reasons, I think we should be very strict about the quality of immigrants’ English language  skills. My ideal immigration system would also privilege under 25s.4

I’m desperately worried about our dependency ratio and while I have altruistic values that extend to all of God’s people, I think the British government’s duty is to our citizens.

But I don’t think this is an argument against low-wage immigrants. We need people on low wages. Low wage workers are disproportionately working for the NHS, doing care, childcare, working in restaurants and warehouses, doing admin. 

1. By just driving down costs for the NHS and care they’re making the cost of providing British public services cheaper. Without these people we would need to spend more on the NHS and social care which means higher taxes – we may be counterfactually poorer without these people.

2. By doing low-paid work in other sectors they are probably making higher-skilled workers more productive. And remember, we have a progressive tax system, so boosting the productivity of high-earners benefits the public purse more than increasing the wages of average and below average workers.

3. Without immigration, British people who are doing more productive work now, would sort into the jobs that immigrants are doing. Thereby becoming less productive themselves.

Remember, from the way we crunch the numbers, the average baby boomer is a net drain on the public purse. If we could choose to delete the 80%-or-so of Boomers who are net recipients from history, would we be better off? Of course not! It is so intuitively obvious that the rich boomers would have been much less productive without their housewives, supermarket clerks, teachers, nurses, care workers, builders and waitresses. They wouldn’t have been able to create the economic growth they did if we had somehow deleted them from existence.5

The same is also true for our time. More workers make us richer and we often choose to use that extra wealth to boost the welfare of our poorer workers but that doesn’t mean that we’re better off without them. We don’t just distribute wealth, we also make it.

Do you want more people or not?

All these arguments for why we might want to severely restrict immigration are also arguments for reducing the birth rate. New babies will increase the strain on public services, housing, and you will eventually have to pay these people’s pensions as well.

Actually, it’s even worse, because for new babies you have to pay for education, child benefits, and you may lose a productive worker to caring for them.

I basically think most of the arguments against low-wage migrants are the same as arguments against pronatalism. This same, very exciting OBR report also shows that the average British person is a net drain.

If you’re worried about having to pay for migrant’s public services you should be worried about the sinister people who want to boost birth rates. You should be especially worried about the sinister people who want to boost birth rates by giving people money, which will disproportionately boost the birth rates of poorer people.6

We have a lot of work to do

This does reveal a core terrifying truth. If the average British person is a net drain and the average immigrant is a net drain, and if rich people are leaving, then we’re living on borrowed time. At some point something has to change or the British state is bankrupt.

It’s not the OBR’s job to predict the future. It’s their job to model the consequences of current policy. Obviously if current productivity trends persist and we don’t have a once-in-a-generation plague that targets old people, then we’re not going to keep up current levels of welfare spending. We should expect severe cuts to all aspects of the welfare state – for the young and old alike.7 And we should expect taxes to go up.

Because we expect these benefits to be reduced, immigrants look like a much more appealing option. 

If you’re under 40, the spending we’ve done on your education has already happened. But with new immigrants we haven’t paid for their education, we’re going to tax them more, and we probably won’t even give them a pension at the end.

Assuming the birth rate doesn’t increase and we want to keep current dependency ratios, by 2050 we’re going to need 38% of the working population to be immigrants.8

Like most developed nations, we’re faced with a choice

1. Boost productivity

2. Boost immigration

3. Boost birth rates

4. Get poor

The Tories chose 2 and 4. Labour are trying to choose 1. In an ideal world we would have boosted productivity to the point where all our choices about birth rates and immigration are about culture and achieving eudaimonia but that’s a luxury we don’t have. Instead we need to be thinking about how to find more human chattel to sacrifice down the NHS mines.

Many of my team would like to boost productivity and birth rates. But those are the hardest choices. I think there’s some low hanging fruit for productivity but I definitely don’t think there’s much low-hanging fruit for boosting birth rates. 

I think there is a valuable conversation here about culture. We currently aren’t choosing immigrants to maximise economic output, nor are we choosing immigrants with the best cultures that can blend harmoniously with British culture. But we’re lucky – Britain is actually really good at integrating migrants. Italy, Japan and France are going to have a much worse time.9

Good institutions and good culture are precious and rare and I fear that Britain will lose these if we become poor (too poor to take care of the old and sick) or if a significant chunk of the population are unintegrated immigrants. But I think most people who are concerned about immigration are too timid to have the conversation that they really want to have about culture so they’re hiding behind economics or “respecting the electorate”.

Personally, I have some cultural concerns but they’re minor when I think about our tax burden and our crumbling public services.

The first thing is an interesting topic for a book, and Kearney explores the key questions in a data rich and clear way. But she also dedicates loads of pages to how brave she is to be speaking up about this issue and how really she isn’t socially conservative.

The most annoying consequence is that the book has lots of tedious paragraphs like this.

I thought about a conversation I had recently had with a different economist in a different setting who reacted negatively when I mentioned the importance of family structure to children’s outcomes. He bristled, suggesting to me that I sounded “socially conservative”, in a way that implied “not academically serious.” I countered, “You are always talking about the things you are doing for your kids and how much time their activities take up in your life. Why would you be offended by the suggestion that maybe other kids would also benefit from having the involvement of two parents, and in particular a father, in their lives?”

The actual substantial problem is that she does not engage properly with right wing explanations for the data she presents – more and more children are being raised by single mothers and this seems to have a strong impact on their educational outcomes, future earnings, odds of going to prison and odds of becoming single parents themselves. She doesn’t ask obvious questions about whether there’s a genetic explanation for these kids’ bad outcomes.

In fact, she frequently presents data that implies there’s a genetic component without even acknowledging that a person could possibly think this. This is what she has to say when talking about gaps in kindergarten test scores between rich and poor kids.

“Although these achievement gaps cannot be definitively linked to differences in parental investments, the fact that they are observed in kindergarten suggests that they are driven by factors that predate (in the children’s lives) anything that could be attributed to the school environment. That shines a spotlight on home environment, early-childhood experience, and even in-utero experiences.”

(Or maybe, just maybe, there are some important pre-utero factors that can impact a person’s life.)

I think it’s plausible that deadbeat dads have bad genes and pass those genes onto their kids and that is a partial explanation for why those kids have worse outcomes. I’d like to know if that’s true and to what extent it’s true, but I’ll have to read a different book to get those answers.

That being said, the book is data-rich and interesting, and here’s what I learned.

The rise of single-parent households

There has been a substantial decrease in the number of children living with married parents. In 1980, 77% of American kids had married parents, now only 63% do. Most of the decline has happened in families without college-education.1 Educated mothers are getting married almost as much as they used to. (When educated women forgo marriage they also, mostly, forgo children too)

The data suggests that this is not because of happy progressive reasons. These children are not living with parents who are living together in stable unions, but have eschewed marriage because they are too modern for that sort of thing. Nor are they mothered by girl-bosses who picked out a top quality father from a sperm-bank and decided to do it by herself. Most of these children are raised by single mothers with little or no support from the dad and they are born to poor mothers.

Kearney’s graph above is statistically naughty. The proportion of Americans not completing high school is not the same as it was forty years ago. Nor is the proportion of Americans who are going to college. She talks about these groups as though they are a static monolith through this period but that is not the case. 

Statistics make it difficult to tell outright lies but they make it easy to wildly exaggerate. She’s presented women with no high school, women with no college, and women with college as though they have been the same group since 1980. Actually the proportions have changed quite dramatically. The 70th percentile woman, by academic attainment, probably didn’t have a college degree and now she does. This means if marriage rates are determined purely by how good at school you are, marriage rates could have been stable overall but declining for each of the education groups that Kearney has created.

This effect overall means that comparing women without high school in 1980 and now is a fool’s errand and it renders a lot of Kearney’s analysis irrelevant.2

While I dislike the way she presents the information, Kearney is right about her core thesis: marriage is declining and that the rise of single parenthood has been concentrated among less educated and poorer mothers. 

For unmarried parents, the fathers usually stay around for a few years. At the time these children are born, 74% of the mothers and 90% of the fathers say they expect to get married. But by the time the child is five, only a third of those couples are still together. In another third the parents are separated but the father is somewhat involved. In the last third, the father is completely absent.

Unfortunately, these fathers are not paying for the upkeep of their children. Only about half of single mothers have child-support agreements with the fathers of their children. Of this half, only 44% of them received the full payment owed. 

This is a problem. Children raised in single-parent households have much worse outcomes. Children raised by single parents, when controlling for other factors, are less likely to complete college. And, this effect has been getting stronger over time. They also are more likely to have behavioural problems, go to prison, and be single parents themselves when they are older.

To some extent this is a selection effect. If marriage has become the preserve of the middle class, then we should expect the children of married parents to have better, more middle class outcomes regardless – your personality is heritable after all.

But even beyond that, single-parenthood is worse. If you have two parents in a house then there are two adults who can dedicate their incomes and time to their children. That kid then has more resources. Unsurprisingly, the children of married couples spend more time with both their parents. And the children of high-income parents have more money spent on them and are therefore more likely to do sport, athletics, music, dance or art.

Some parents are Bad Actually

Kearney then uses the facts above to promote marriage but I’m dissatisfied with her exploration of the counterfactual. The average dad might have a really positive impact on their kids' lives. But not all dads are the average dad. Some dads are long term out of work and contribute nothing to the family’s finances. They don’t pick up after themselves and add to the household chores rather than help with them. They are addicted to drugs or alcohol, they’re violent, they make for terrible role models, and they burden the psyche of the already-overextended mother with their presence.

And Kearney brings up evidence to support this claim. There is a study from Ohio that measures the difference in outcomes between the children of men who committed the same crimes but receive different sentences. They indicate that if a parent is incarcerated  and therefore taken away, then their child is less likely to go on to commit a crime themselves. She also cites the ethnographic work of two sociologists who interview 162 single mothers and write their findings up in a book called “Promises I can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage.” They suggest that many women don’t marry their children’s fathers because they do not see them as a reliable source of economic security and stability.’

Obviously, lots of dads who leave aren’t total criminals. But clearly, some parents are more dedicated to parenting than others. The American Time Use Survey has found that highly educated parents spend less time on leisure activities, sleep and household chores. They spend that extra time with their children even though they also work more hours. I don’t know if this itself is going to make a big difference on a child’s outcomes but I do know that conscientiousness is heritable.

People grow up to be like their parents

Genes and culture are both important and I am going to controversially suggest that people often grow up to be like their parents.

Except for some rare extenuating circumstances, I think fathers who leave their children and skip out on their child support payments are bad people. I think women who have unplanned pregnancies with unreliable men make bad decisions. I think people pass on traits like criminality and impulsivity to their children. Similarly, I think a child born to hyper-educated and conscientious parents inherit some traits that make them more likely to go to university.

If we could wave a magic wand and guarantee that every child grows up with both of their parents, there would still be a disparity in outcomes between the children of the elite and the children of high-school dropouts.

What’s the causal direction?

There is good evidence that suggests that it’s definitely not just bad genes. In the US, different states brought in more liberal divorce laws at different points. Using data from the censuses from 1960 to 1990, before and after the laws were being implemented, you can see that these legal changes increased the number of divorces and subsequently, children had worse levels of education, lower incomes, and more marital churn themselves when compared with similar children in states with stricter divorce laws.

This suggests to me that the act of parents splitting up, not just the traits that make splitting up likely, has a deleterious impact on children.

Girls don’t like boys, they like cars and money

So why is marriage in decline? In the book Kearney puts across one main theory. She says that women don’t really want men around. They like babies and they need sperm for that. They like money, and often men can help with that. But, if men aren’t earning that much more than them, they can make off with their sperm and be happier without them. She hasn’t quite put it like that. (I don’t even think this is what she believes. If I pressed her on it, I’d guess that she would say that she thought cultural factors were more important but she’s an economist, and therefore only argues for the theory that she has data for.)

She says:

Since the 1980s, economic trends have favoured workers with college degrees, making it harder for those without a college degree to obtain a secure footing in the workforce with a steady, well-paying job. Men without college degrees have seen their earnings stagnate and employment rates fall. Women, meanwhile, have experienced increases in average earnings regardless of their education level. This change has stripped many men of their traditional role as breadwinner for the family and, in simple terms, made them less desirable marriage partners.’’

What this means is that between 1990 and 2020, college educated women earned about 70% of what college-educated men earned. Now they earn 76% of what college-educated men earn and this corresponds with a modest drop in marriage rates for college-educated mothers. On the other hand, non-college-educated women went from earning 54% of what non-college-educated men earned to 74%. This has corresponded with a much greater decrease in their marriage rates. Also, in areas where women tend to earn more than men, marriage rates are lower.

She then looks at papers that track marriage rates in the places that have been most heavily hit by declines in manufacturing and sees that yes, a decrease in manufacturing jobs and an increase in the number of robots used – something that we should expect to impact male employment more than female employment – decreases the number of new marriages and increases the number of births to unmarried women.

However the opposite doesn't seem to hold. Areas that benefited from the fracking boom, i.e, places where the employment of non-college-educated men was boosted more than women’s incomes, they found that there was an associated increase in the number of babies born but there was no marked increase in marriages.

This is plausibly because, after marriage rates fall, social norms shift, and people are less likely to want to get married at all. During the coal boom of the 70s and 80s, when single-motherhood was rare, the marriage rate went up as well as the number of children born.

Of course this model can’t explain what’s happening fully – 74% is still less than 76%. If the underlying cause was truly about relative earnings, then we should see a world in which poor women were more likely to be married. In fact, considering the diminishing utility of money, we should expect poor women to be much more motivated to marry, regardless of their relative incomes.

Marriage Penalties

The book completely ignores marriage penalties. If people get poorer by getting married to each other, it makes perfect sense that they wouldn’t then get married. I think it is a massive oversight that she doesn’t discuss this.

If you assume that 20 to 49 year old Americans would marry someone who earns the same as them, the average single American is facing a potential marriage tax of 2.69%. The top-line federal income tax brackets are marriage neutral, but other features of taxes and benefit programs penalise marriage. As a result, the marriage penalty is higher for poorer families who receive more in benefits. So for the bottom quintile, who presumably need the money more, the average marriage tax is 3.71%. For the top quintile it is 1.49%.

They also found that a one percent increase in marriage penalties decreased the odds of getting married later by 3.69% in women with children. (And 1.12% for women without.) For a 25-year-old woman, in the bottom quintile of earnings, with a child, her marriage tax rate reduces her chances of being married at 35 by 7.52%.

There are lots of things we need to consider when designing taxes and benefits. Most policymakers want

1. The children of poorer families to have the best chance in life – which will often mean removing barriers that stop their parents from marrying and staying together

2. Women in abusive relationships to feel able to escape their situation without worrying about losing benefits for them and their children

3. Benefits to be progressive, meaning we give more to people on lower incomes

You could achieve 1 and 2 with more UBI-like systems but those are very expensive. Amber Lapp of the Institute for Family Studies suggests here that they should double the threshold for benefits like Medicaid for married couples. I’m sure this would create some new distortions in the system, but they probably wouldn’t be as bad as the distortions we currently have.3

The end of shotgun marriages

With the rise of abortion came the death of the shotgun marriage. Until about 1970 if a man got a woman pregnant, the expectation from all parties – the couple, her family, his family, the broader community etc – was that he would marry her.

Janet Yellen’s theory is that before abortion and widespread contraception, having a child out of wedlock was so damaging to women that they would only have sex with men if they believed that, in the event they got pregnant, the man would step up and marry her. This meant that women were extracting these promises from men, only having sex with them if they thought they would follow through, and other men were enforcing this norm because they benefited from this norm existing. Close association with a cad and charlatan would probably damage your own standing among the women in your community. If you were married your wife would be angry with you for remaining friends with such a person. If you were single, the taint of this man would rub off on you and you’d struggle to get a girlfriend.

The rise of contraception and abortion meant that women who didn’t mind using contraception, and didn’t have an ethical objection to abortion, no longer extracted the promise of marriage from the men they slept with. This undermined the collective bargaining power of women and sex without commitment became a mainstream relationship norm.

Now, as the choice of whether to have an abortion is primarily the choice of the pregnant woman, a man could reasonably say “I wanted her to have an abortion. I don’t see why I’m on the hook for her choice.” He doesn’t feel the need to step up. And men and women who are happy with contraception don’t want to pressure him to.

And so, outside of isolated communities where abortion is frowned upon, shotgun marriages don’t really happen. Despite the hardship of solo-parenting, lots of women still want children and they are still having these children alone and so begins the “feminization of poverty” that comes from the uptick of single-mother households.

What does Kearney think we should do about it?

This is the weakest part of the book.

In summary, here are the things we should do to address the challenges I have laid out in this book

Work to restore and foster a norm of two-parent homes for children

• Work to improve the economic position of men without a college level of education so the are more reliable marriage partners and fathers

• Scale up  government and community programs that show promise in strengthening families and improving outcomes for parents and children from disadvantaged backgrounds

• Have a stronger safety net for families, regardless of family structure

  Here are some things I do not think we should do

• Accept a new reality where the two-parent family is a thing of the past for less educated, lower-income Americans

• Bemoan the economic independence of women

• Stigmatize single mothers or encourage unhealthy marriages

• Run unsuccessful government marriage programs

• Keep government assistance meager under the mistaken assumption that doing so will incentivize more marriages and two-parent families

I don’t think that any of these policy solutions make sense with the evidence she presents throughout the book

Boost men’s wages

“I want to be explicit in stating the following: the growth in women’s earnings and economic opportunities is a positive social trend, unequivocally.”

And then talks about ways she wishes to bolster the earnings of working class men to make them more marriageable. I think it’s worth emphasising a fact from earlier in the book where she acknowledges women still earn less than men. While the gap is shrinking, it still exists. Sure, maybe she wants to widen the gap by increasing men’s wages instead of by depressing womens’ – but she keeps reiterating that women gaining financial independence is a good thing. You can’t have your cake and eat it.

Also, earlier in the book she shows that in areas that have already experienced the collapse of marriage, boosts to men’s earnings, relative to women’s earnings don’t boost marriage rates anyway.

Criminal Justice Reform

She then talks about how we should do criminal justice reform to decrease the number of American dads in prison.

“Criminal justice reform and prisoner reentry efforts will also be needed to reduce the number of American men who spend time incarcerated and to help those who do have criminal backgrounds reintegrate into society and the workforce.”

Earlier in the book she uses fathers with criminal convictions as an example of how some children are not better off with their fathers around. She points to studies which show that when fathers escape prison due to lenient judges their kids are worse off.

Useless Programs

She then writes about a series of Bush-era policies that tried to strengthen marriage.

“An obvious way to help strengthen families would be to run programs that encourage stable marriages. But such efforts have been tried and they generally did not work well. Early in the first decade of the 2000s, the federal government took up the cause of trying to encourage healthy, stable marriages by funding community programs with that goal. The Healthy Marriage Initiative, launched by the Bush administration in 2001, provided federal funding for voluntary programs run by local and state governments and community organizations to promote marriage among low-income couples with children. The results of these studies were not very encouraging. The programs appeared to help people in some ways, but they didn’t meaningfully increase marital stability among participating couples.”

So instead she says that we should have fatherhood promoting programs instead of marriage promoting programs.

“There is not a trend toward programming that promotes strong families (not necessarily marriage) and engaged fatherhood. Fatherhood programs are being designed and implemented around the country, as discussed in chapter 6. Some fatherhood programs work with dads on parenting techniques and conflict-management skills. Others additionally work to address personal barriers in the form of unstable employment or previous incarceration. There is still much to be learned about how to design these programs in such a way that they produce meaningful improvements, but it seems clear that building on and experimenting with programs that engages fathers and that work to improve parental cooperation and active co-parenting between mothers and fathers is more likely to be a successful approach than programs that focus on encouraging or sustaining marriage per se.”

But she’s already shown, in the book, that these programs don’t work either. She mentions one study about one of these programs and it shows that men who participated had better “self reported nurturing behaviour” but didn’t actually spend any more time with their children. Basically, they learned the right, researcher-approved language for talking about their kids.

Welfare

Then, after saying that in order to address inequality we need much more generous welfare payments for all parents – single and married alike. But after that she says,

“Even in Denmark, a bastion of public welfare that includes free college tuition, universal access to high-quality health care, universal high-quality pre-K, and a generous childcare and maternity-leave policy, the influence of family background on many child outcomes is about as strong as it is in the US.”

Basically, everything Kearney proposes to counteract the decline of the marriage contradicts other things she says. On her own terms, she has nothing to offer.

That shouldn’t surprise us. Basically everything I’ve listed above – more welfare, less incarceration, raising wages for people without college, spending money on random ineffectual feel-good programs – is just part of your average Democrat platform. She’s written a book about something the Democrat establishment doesn’t really care about and then concludes that all their solutions were right anyway.

Based on what Kearney has said, if I were serious about countering the decline in marriage in the working class US, I would not conclude that more of the same was good enough. I would probably pay people to get married – either through tax breaks or some kind of cash payment, and then I would make it difficult to get divorced.

But I also don’t think she’s convinced me that the main problem even is the decline of marriage. I’ve been convinced that on the margin, more people should get married and once married, we should stop them from getting divorced.

But I don’t think the main issue here is that people aren’t marrying enough. I think it’s because there aren’t enough good men in the US. 9% of all American men are incarcerated at some point in their lives, 19% still live with their parents and 15% don’t work. Who knows how many are addicts, abusive, or criminals who haven’t yet been caught? What right-thinking woman is going to take on that burden?

Now, I don’t expect that men were better in the past. They were probably just as violent and useless – if not more so. But it used to be much worse to be an unmarried woman. Women were paid less, single mothers were much more maligned, and it was easier to fall into life threatening poverty. 

The fact that it’s possible, through a combination of welfare and job opportunities, to live an adequate existence without male support means that lots of women and children are much better off. The consequences aren’t “unequivocally good”, but I don’t think they’re so dire that I’d wish to reverse this trend.

I think that the decline in marriage is, in large part, the result of women looking at what possible men are on offer and saying “no thanks.” It’s difficult to know in what proportion of these cases, the women are making choices that are good for them and their children, and in what proportion of these cases they are missing out on resources, love, and support that would make everyone better off. But I think that a lot of these women are canny. At the point at which these children are born, the women are less likely to think that they will eventually get married than the men do. They don’t seem to be choosing motherhood while completely ignorant of what their future is going to look like.

Kearney, towards the end of her book, has a story about an Uber driver she talked to. He said that he has a daughter, but she’s not with his kids mother. Kearney asks why and he gives a half-hearted answer and says that maybe they’d get married and live together if he saved up enough money. She concludes that surely, if he loves his daughter and gets along with his ex, they could make it work.

I also have an Uber driver story  — who the fuck doesn’t. When I was in New Mexico, I had a half hour journey with a driver, a 29 year old woman who I’ll call Jane. Jane was a single mum with a seven year old son. She had been training to be a nurse but during the pandemic her son’s nursery closed down so she switched to doing UberEats deliveries so she could take care of him while working. He’d hang out with her in the back of the car.

Jane and I talked about boys. A man she had a situationship with tried to call her and she rejected the call to keep talking to me. The problem with him, she said, was that he just wasn’t responsible enough. He had a factory job, but he had only just started it and had a history of not sticking with anything. He’d been arrested a few weeks ago for a DUI. “He’s just not in the position to be a good step-father.”

I then asked her about her son’s father. She said that she was twenty one when they were dating and he had been much older. She found out, after she was pregnant with her son, that he had been lying to her about his age and mysterious “other things.” She broke up with him and moved in with her mum.

I think Jane has done the right thing for her son by breaking up with his father. Her ominous tone implied to me that he had done something quite nasty. If I had to guess, I’d say he was sleeping with Jane when he already had a wife and family at home. I think it’s likely that Kearney’s Uber driver, even if he seemed like a nice man for the twenty minutes they were together, was, like the men in Jane’s life, too unreliable to be a father.

The argument for culture goes something like this; “most of our great grandmothers gave birth to several children, in two room shacks, and couldn’t afford a spare pair of shoes. We are richer than we’ve ever been. There is no way that people can’t afford to have children. We simply have other priorities now.”

The argument for economics is something like this; “children are as valuable as they have always been, but as we get richer the value of work and leisure has improved so much. And while we have washing machines and epidurals, children still take up a career’s worth of time and effort. People see this and then they invent rationalisations for why they don’t want as many children as their ancestors. Culture is downstream of economics here.”

In my last post I wrote about how European countries with more socially conservative beliefs actually have lower birth-rates than those with socially liberal beliefs. That may sound like I’m making a contrarian and counterintuitive argument for Team Culture but I am incredibly suspicious of all stories about how being socially liberal could lead to more children.

My best guess for why socially liberal societies could have higher birth-rates would be a general endorsement for the left. I’d say that people in socially liberal countries are happy and people are like pandas – they only make babies if their lives are good. But that sounds like bullshit to me.

So let’s examine the data more closely.

This is the strongest trend Boom found in Europe. Of the social values checked, the more people believed that a pre-school child suffers if their mother works, the fewer children they had.

The trend is sufficiently weak, and Europe is sufficiently small and similar to itself, that I thought it could be a weird fluke. I thought that maybe Scandinavian countries are very socially liberal but also have very generous pro-parent welfare policies, which means they could disrupt the rest of the data.

So I thought that before coming up with explanations, it was worth checking to see if the trend exists globally.

I have decided to compare the OECD numbers for fertility with the World Values Survey questions, to see if this trend persists.1

This graph matches the European trend. I now think it is safe to say that, in the rich world, if your people believe that a working mother somehow harms her children, this means you will have lower birth-rates. It seems that moving from this being a fringe opinion to being something most people believe, loses you one baby for every four women.

So why might this be the case?

Childcare

If most of your fellow countrymen believe that young mothers should be at home with their children, then there will be less political support for generous childcare subsidies. “Really, childcare is only used by work-a-holic harridans so why should we help them?”

But this doesn’t hold up.

Surprisingly it turns out the cost of nursery schooling has basically no impact on TFR. Austria and Switzerland have a lot in common, but in Vienna your nursery costs you 3% of your income (at that point, why charge at all?) and in Zurich it will cost you 64% – regardless you’re going to have the same number of kids.

Because countries offer very different benefits for different subsets of the population, schools start at different ages, and parental leave policies vary so much, it is difficult to get a real country by country comparison. Nonetheless, these OECD numbers seem to be the best on the market.

I’ll go into more detail about childcare policies at some point. But for now, I am unsatisfied by the childcare argument.

Weirdly, in countries where people think nurseries are bad for small children, nurseries are cheaper. (But this is a very weak correlation.)

Social pressure

Maybe the cost of childcare doesn’t really tell you much about whether people use it. In Vienna, maybe you think about dropping your child off at their cheap nursery but you can’t bring yourself to do it because you think you’re inflicting debilitating trauma on them.

While childcare may technically be very cheap, it could be too shameful and emotionally taxing to use it, so actually the cost of having two children isn’t 3% of your income, it’s actually 100%.

But there also appears to be no relationship between the number of under twos in childcare and TFR. Nor, it seems, is there any relationship with the proportion of mothers of under-twos who work and TFR.

This implies to me that it’s not really about the cost of taking care of children at all.

Hard work

If you think a child suffers from being away from its mother, you probably believe one of two things. First, there is a sacred bond between mothers and babies, and the infant is somehow psychologically damaged if they spend too much time apart.

Or, you believe that small children require a lot of attention to develop properly and there is no way to practically provide that if there are lots of children and only a few adults. And that paid workers, while able to ensure that a child eats, sleeps and doesn’t electrocute themselves, they are probably not sufficiently motivated to continually stimulate an infant in the ways that are best for brain development.

If you believe either of these things, then you probably don’t think that you can have a new baby if you already have another young child in the house because you will, by necessity, be depriving the older child of their mother’s attention.

What data can you use to test whether people think children are a lot of work? The best thing I found was the amount of time that the mother spends on care.

Now we’re starting to get a graph that looks like the first one. This could be a plausible mechanism.

Maybe it is economics after all …

This third idea seems somewhat compelling to me. Especially because the belief that when a mother works, the child suffers, has a stronger relationship with TFR than other socially conservative beliefs about women and work.

Is this a victory for team economics? Countries where mothers spend more time with babies have fewer babies – that’s not proof by any means, but it sure seems like a clue about what’s going on. It indicates that the more effort children are, the fewer children get made.

But, the effort needed to raise kids is not determined objectively. Polish mothers aren’t spending twice as much time with their kids than Belgian mothers because their babies are inexplicably more difficult. There are cultural beliefs that underpin what’s happening.

It is easy to believe that the world is progressing from conservatism to liberalism – and that if generations change their minds about something, it must be because they believe the more liberalism-y thing.

But actually, beliefs can change for other reasons too. Not everything is about the culture war. For some reason, we’re tending towards an era of baggy jeans (again), and that has nothing to do with how woke people are (and don’t let some click-monger working in the Conde Nast mines tell you otherwise). Cultures reimagine the world all the time for all kinds of reasons, “woke” being just one of them.

In this particular case, I think the birth-rate-destroying belief is not really a conservative belief about women and gender. It is actually a belief about babies. My guess is that if the World Values Survey asked whether “It takes a lot of work to raise a child well”, then we would find an even stronger correlation.

Sarah Therese is a home-schooled Canadian Christian fundamentalist and YouTuber, she’s under thirty and has five children. Classically Abby (Ben Shapiro’s sister) makes a series of half political, half lifestyle content about motherhood and “classic living”. She talks about how being a parent is your duty and without parenthood you are wasting your life. Hannah or @ballerinafarm is a retired ballerina and mother of seven, who quit her “city career” to run a farm with her husband and run in beauty pageants. The internet is full of them.

(Of course, all of these women work from home but they are not “stay-at-home mothers”. They are, in fact, professional influencers. Sarah Therese’s husband even quit his job to help her business.)

These women present an appealing and maybe even plausible answer to the birth rates issue. What if, to save humanity, we had to turn our backs on modernity and enjoy a simple life? What if men had to provide and women had to stay at home and act feminine? What if the answer lies in homemade bread and floral dresses.

If you’re of a conservative inclination, you probably want to believe that in the 1960s we invented casual sex and ‘career women’ and now Western civilisation is paying for it with a high dependency ratio and a shrinking native population.

This seems intuitively true. Historically, in Western society, women had fewer socially acceptable life paths. You could be a wife and mother, and your status was affected by how good you were at those things. Maybe, you could be a nun if that really wasn’t for you. Otherwise, you probably had to be a prostitute or an eccentric, unloved spinster.

Now, many of the most widely respected women don’t have children. In fact, it’s probably higher status for a woman to excel in a profession than it is for her to have three kids and raise them well. And, if she has these children, and puts in the effort, then she will harm her chances at excelling in that status-accruing career. Basically, the lesson of the last few decades is that women can’t have it all – and sometimes the thing they choose to give up is motherhood. (This is basically the underlying message of the Barbie movie.)

On an intra-national level, this theory holds up. Republicans have higher birth rates than Democrats.

But, strangely, on an international level, countries with conservative values do not have higher birth rates. My friends at the Boom campaign have written about how “family values”, as found in the European Values Survey, and TFR have a surprising correlation. More conservative values, like believing that one has a duty to society to have children, are held in countries with lower birth rates.

These are weak correlations but are certainly worth further thought.

In my next few blogs I’m going to see if the same trend exists for OECD countries and if it exists between states in the US. Even if this trend doesn’t hold up globally or within the US, I don’t want to minimise this result. I think it is incredibly surprising that socially conservative beliefs have little or no impact on nation-wide birth rates.

Does it mean that when women don’t feel obligated to be mothers, they want to do it more? Does it mean that more socially liberal countries compensate parents more, because they don’t feel that people are naturally obligated to provide for the next generation? Or does it mean that the more important we think motherhood is, the more difficult it becomes, and so these women have fewer children?

And if it’s not a shift in values, then why do increases in a country’s wealth cause its birth rate to fall anyway?