Thread by @lymanstoneky

surprise, libertarians believe that everything in the world is the result of unfettered individual choices, and governments are powerless to do anything good. reason.com/2023/05/02/sto…

when a libertarian gives you a detailed and empirically informed account of why a specific regulation you've never heard of is actually very bad, that's an example of ideology effectively motivating good research.

when the argument is just "but muh price tag," it's just ideology

especially when every example of countries actually achieving major fertility changes is ignored, when peoples stated preferences are waived off as not real enough for libertarianism's exacting standards of Truly Free Choice, etc

but anyways i am sure for Reason's reflexively anti-family and anti-communitarian readers the article will be a nice warm blanket assuring them that there's just nothing to be done, and fertility is falling because everybody is so happy with their lives.

the actually funny bit is pivoting from "pronatalism is too expensive" to "instead we should just raise taxes to fix the ever-growing gaps in entitlements"

okay one last thing

the study saying it costs 1% of GDP to raise TFR by 0.2 points--- that's super cheap.

that's basically saying we could add hundreds of thousands of babies for the amount Americans currently spend on alcohol each year.

that's a bargain folks. if we can durably increase fertility by 0.2 points for the price of $250 bil/yr, approximately American annual spending on clothing, that would dramatically improve the actuarial outlook for Social Security and Medicare to say the least.

now in reality I'm a bit skeptical of that particular paper and think the real elasticity is both somewhat lower and more complicated to estimate---

but it's just kinda wild to be like, "for approximately 1/25th of government spending we can increase fertility by about 10-20% while also eliminating child poverty but, hey, why bother when instead we can just raise taxes to subsidize retiree consumption instead?"

I want to delve into an example of pronatalism that many experts know and rightly loathe, laypeople may dimly know and misunderstand, and that I think is both an informative signpost and a warning of what the future holds: Romania under Decree 770.

In her piece, @ENBrown did not mention Romania. This may be because she thinks it's so egregious it doesn't need rebutting. Or it may be she's not aware of it; a quick search shows no tweets from her ever mentioning Romania and no articles referencing it either.

So, to begin with, what happened in Romania?

Romanian fertility fell very sharply between WWII and the early 1960s, not least due to its extremely liberal abortion policy, which led to MAJORITIES of conceptions ending in abortion.

In the mid-to-late 1960s, especially after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was beginning to get some distance between himself and the USSR, and as a result Romanian elites felt their country needed to be a bigger player in Europe.

So Ceaușescu implemented Decree 770. On its face, all Decree 770 did was ban contraception and abortion, except for women over 40, women with over 4 kids, or cases of rape, incest or health of the mother. The abortion part is popular with American conservatives today.

Though we wouldn't make age and parity exceptions.

The contraception part was arguably the bigger shock. Romanian women lost abortion access, which had been their main form of limitation, and had no contraceptive alternative.

Now, on its face, while this policy may be bad, it isn't quite the horror show you know about if you know about Romania. What made it *infamously* bad was that it was implemented by a dictatorial communist state who enforced it through secret police activities.

Secret police surveilled and harassed doctors. Pregnant women had checkups. Miscarriages got police investigations. Women were randomly pulled for mandatory gyno exams. It was egregious. People were killed. Paradigmatic example of a wicked kind of pronatalism.

Little known fact: Romania wasn't the first place to do this. Japan had a similar policy, complete with pregnancy police, 1850ish to the 1930s. Which contributed to Japan's major fertility rise in that period. However, in Japan, most efforts were aimed at stopping infanticide.

So before I go on, let me make clear again, I think what Romania did was bad and hurt people and I don't want it implemented somewhere else.

I also think that we have so learned the "Romania bad" lesson that we have kind of failed to learn any of the *actual lessons*.

So, Decree 770 had a lot of punitive police stuff.

But that isn't all that happened. At the same time, Romania rolled out special extra taxes on childless people. Mothers with many kids had lower tax rates. Child allowances were raised and baby bonuses given for higher parity.

Decree 770 has such an infamous record that the wider range of Romania's policies are pretty well forgotten. People often forget that MOST Soviet countries had pronatal fiscal policies and special taxes on childless people, which is why Soviet countries had higher TFR.

So, what happened to Romanian fertility?

Here's Romanian TFR vs. Moldovan and Bulgarian TFR (decently good comparators) over time.

You can see that Romanian fertility ROCKETS upwards from 1.9 to 3.7.

So right here let's take a pause. If someone tells you "Storks Don't Take Orders From the State" as @ENBrown does, they're empirically wrong. When the state orders more births, there are more births.

Again, I'm not saying this policy was good! But my point is that 99% of the pronatal policies that have been studied and attempted in recent decades are "low effort" policies. Small shares of government revenues in haphazardly designed programs that usually serve alternative ends

Take Korea as an example. They talk about how much they've spent.

Korea's family spending per child remains BELOW the OECD average. Most "pronatal" spending goes in the form of local government grants to prop up services in falling-population rural areas.

I'm not even certain it's reasonable to call that kind of spending pronatal tbh. You haven't tried pronatalism until your family spending per child is above the OECD average and it happens through spending directly on the child IMHO.

Hungary of course does have high spending--- but Hungary's per child family spending actually DECLINED in the early CSOK years (though it's probably rising again now).

My point in all of this is economists and demographers have vanishingly few cases we can study where a country suddenly implemented a dramatic increase in family spending. Most of the studies involved are dealing with very small policy experiments vs. cost of childrearing.

Which relates to the point I take @phil_wellesley to be making when @ENBrown quotes him. Existing pronatal experiments haven't yielded many big effects in no small part *because they mostly involve trivial sums!*

Even with those trivial sums, MOST studies DO find effects! Is there publication bias? Probably yes, we need more studies. Nonetheless, the fact that there's maybe bias is no reason to act like the scores of studies finding small effects from small programs should just be ignored

And in the small number of BIG programs, like Romania, we in fact observe BIG effects. So it's not that "big pronatalism has never been tried." Big pronatalism HAS been tried. AND IT WORKED.

It also had egregious side effects I'll come to!

But what we in fact observe is that small pronatal policies yield small increases in births and big pronatal policies yield big increases in births which strongly suggests that births are sensitive to pronatal policies, idk, YMMV.

Okay now let's ask another question.

HOW did Romania's policies boost births?

First of all, let's make one thing clear. It was NOT just a change in tempo. OVRALL FAMILY SIZE ROSE. I don't have completed fertility for Moldova, but here's Romania and Bulgaria:

For this graph, I take CFR at age 40, and then throw it back to the year women turned 25, to show how women in peak reproductive years at each period ended up in terms of family size. Women in their 20s in the late 1960s to 80s are the core group impacted by Decree 770.

As you can see, for women in their 20s before Decree 770, Romanian and Bulgarian women had similar ultimate family sizes; in fact Romanian women were maybe a big lower.

Post-Decree 770, ultimate family size jumped way up, and remained elevated until after the end of Decree 770.

Romania rose from slightly-below-replacement CFR to considerably-above-replacement CFR in about 5 years. That's fast and big and exactly the change skeptics of pronatal policy like @ENBrown say can't happen, but it in fact did happen (we're coming to costs soon, I promise).

Okay so WHO had these babies?

We can start with the simple one and go by age. Here's Romania and Bulgaria birth rates by age for 1966 (pre-770), 1968 (first year of 770), and 1975 and 1985 (after the policy had fully matured).

In 1968, we see a huge increase in Romania at all ages to levels higher than observed for any other line shown. The sudden policy shock to contraception and abortion led to a huge birth increase across the board.

But by 1975 or 1985, it's a different story.

Here's the differences between Romania and Bulgaria by year. This helps you see what's going on. In 1966, Romanian women under 30 had lower fertility than Bulgarian women under 30, then higher after.

In 1968, higher at all ages.

But the interesting thing is 1975 and 1985. There you see that by the 1970s and 1980s, Romania had LOWER teen birth rates than Bulgaria. Decree 770 did NOT lead to a long-term increase in teen birth rates. The increase in births was among women in their 20s and 30s.

So who were these women in their 20s and 30s having all these babies?

Overwhelmingly MARRIED women in their 20s and 30s. Rates of nonmarital birth in Romania were extremely low (not least because marriage had huge tax favoritism).

Okay so, Romania births under Decree 770 were disproportionately NOT to teen moms and disproportionately NOT to unmarried moms. Mostly married moms in their 20s and 30s.

Up to here you're probably going, "Wait so why the terrible reputation?"

Let's turn to kids and health.

Although Decree 770 babies were disproportionately born to adult moms in married households receiving extremely generous government financial support, they were still disproportionately, especially in the early years, unwanted. Here's their death odds vs. other countries:

I want you to see three big things.

First, even before Decree 770, Romania had worse child mortality than Bulgaria.

Second, Decree 770 led to an immediate sharp increase in child death.

Third, that increase is similar in scale TO A LITERAL CIVIL WAR.

REAL BAD.

Now notice two more things.

Fourth, the child mortality rate had normalized vs. relative pre-trend with Bulgaria by the early 1970s.

Fifth, child mortality in all these periods is at very low levels: a fraction of 1%.

So the early years of Decree 770 led to a dramatic, awful spike in child mortality similar to what we see in similar wartorn regions.

Also, Romania's relatively bad conditions for children predated Decree 770, and by the early 1970s excess child mortality was gone.

However, child mortality isn't the only bad thing! There's so much more!

I've had a hard time finding Bulgarian and Moldovan maternal mortality before 1985, but I have Romanian. Here's maternal mortality.

Very clearly, Decree 770 did very bad things to women's odds of surviving birth!

What's interesting here is that conditions actually got WORSE over the course of the policy being in place. So whereas child mortality conditions IMPROVED, maternal mortality conditions WORSENED.

I think there's a good explanation for this.

Over the course of Decree 770, two things changed.

1) Pregnancy surveillance got MORE INTENSE
2) Financial support for birth got MORE GENEROUS

My guess is improving financial support alleviated child welfare outcomes, but increasing pregnancy surveillance hurt women.

Most abortions were illegal, so women pursued illegal, less safe abortions, which often had bad outcomes. And we have data on if maternal deaths were after abortions!

By the 1980s, almost 90% of maternal deaths were abortion deaths.

So my view is:
Decree 770 Overall-->More Births
Pregnancy Surveillance-->Desperate Women Seeking Unsafe Abortions-->More Dead Moms
Financial Benefits-->Alleviating Health Consequences of Unwanted Births

Now, you may wonder: what happened to NON ABORTION RELATED maternal mortality in Romania?

I assume Bulgaria and Moldova had 80% non-abortion-related MMR, similar to Romania pre and post Decree 770.

Non-abortion MMR declined.

So, Decree 770 caused maternal mortality to rise, 100% through the channel of deaths related to unsafe and mostly illegal abortions.

Keep that in mind as we get to lessons learned and what modern states might attempt to do.

Another infamous consequence of Decree 770 is increased rates of orphans. Romanian orphans are a famous trope around the world. They represent a genuine humanitarian disaster, and also an egregiously misunderstood one.

Romanian orphancy has a long history. Romania set up an unusually large system of state-run orphanages immediately after WWII, and provided generous state support to them.

Then came Decree 770. There was an explosion of unwanted children. What to do?

The best account is in "Voices of the Silent Cradle." Here's an excerpt:

Did you catch that?

You see, the STORY we have received around the world is Romania was inundated with orphans because families didn't want them.

There's a grain of truth to that, but a metric ton of stereotyping about cold Soviet women.

The real story is the Romanian state *wanted* orphans who were seen as easier to program into loyal servants of the state, institutions *robbed* families of their children, and the bare minimum laws aimed at protecting kids were egregiously ignored.

Then in the 1980s this system was 1) failing to provide loyal servants and 2) getting too expensive, and so budgets were slashed. Conditions in the orphanages became apocalyptically bad. This is when international attention arrived:

Another key issue in orphanages was disablity. Orphans were disproportionately disabled and deaths were especially high among disabled kids. But there I must protest a bit: these were disproportionately kids who would have been killed in utero, we can't blame Romania for this.

Like it seems unfair to fault Romania for allowing a disabled child 3 years of life when in Denmark at the same time they got 0.

Regardless, it's key to remember that the best estimates suggest only 4% of kids in Romanian orphanages were actually orphans in the sense of having been abandoned by their parents. Of the maybe 170,000 kids in these facilities in 1989-90, under 20k were true orphans.

Again, from Voices of the Silent Cradles:

The sympathies of the West exacerbated issues, as Romania turned into a fertile place to buy kids, with poor Romanian women targeted on the assumption they were bountiful sources of orphans for adoption.

So okay. Let's go with a high-ish end estimate of kids in orphanages: 250,000. Let's say they are evenly spaced ages 0 to 14 in 1990. Let's say an extra 50,000 kids had exited by that time. So 300,000 kids entered these facilities. Let's assume it's all caused by Decree 770.

That means that of the 1.6 million extra children born due to Decree 770, about 300,000 were put into orphanages. Of those, let's say 10% were actually orphans; the remaining 270,000 were given up/taken for other reasons. So Decree 770 made 30,000 orphans.

Of these, about 7,000 were orphaned specifically by maternal mortality, see here: demogr.mpg.de/Papers/worksho…

Of the remaining 270,000 non-orphans in state care, it's hard to know what to make of them. Some of them were essentially state-sponsored kidnappings. Others were families giving up unwanted kids, but in contravention of laws about child support.

But it does seem to me that rates of child abandonment might be a bit higher in a communist dictatorship where the government is basically a psycho madman's playground than in some other kind of society, is all I'm saying.

SORRY, math error.

Of the 3 million, not 1.6 million, births caused by Decree 770, 300,000 ended up in facilities, maybe. So about 10%. And of those 30,000 orphans. Of those 7,000 orphans of maternal mortality.

So, orphans made up perhaps 1% of the additional births caused by Decree 770.

Now, since 1997, we have actual data on kids in Romania put into state care. If we use our 300,000 number divided across 23 years of Decree 770, and then we assume 1/14 of kids in state care since 1997 were newborns, here's approximate rates of Romanian kids being put in care:

So it's clear that Decree 770 was increasing the number of kids in state care.... but also seems clear that a lot of Romanian kids get put in state care even TODAY. Using identical calculation method, Romania TODAY has 2x the rate of state care vs. births as the US does.

Personally, I think that if we take the estimate of 300,000 kids put into state care during Decree 770 (seems plausible ish? maybe?), we can probably only attribute about 150,000 of them actually to Decree 770. And of those, some nontrivial share were kidnapped, not abandoned.

So Decree 770 was real bad! And one reason it was bad was it put egregious numbers of kids in abysmally bad state care! And some reasons it did that is the government WANTED orphans, then massively slashed child support budgets.

So. These are the usual horrors related to Decree 770 that get pointed out: child mortality, maternal mortality, and orphancy. All three are very real.

Let's do some quantifying.

How many extra child deaths? How many extra maternal deaths? How many extra kids in state care?

Well, 150-300k kids in state care.
The MMR math gives about 10,000 maternal deaths.
The child death math gives about 5,000 excess child deaths.

And about 3 million extra babies were born as I mentioned.

So, suppose you're a dictatorial regime that wants a bigger population. Does Decree 770 look like a good option?

The math for our hypothetical evil dictator whose name is Xi Jinping works like this:
3,000,000 Extra Births
- 10,000 dead moms
- 5,000 dead kids
- 300,000 kids on state support
= a net increase of 2,685,000 births on a counterfactual of 6.5 million births or so

On the whole, it looks to me like for an evil dictator that's pretty cheap. 2.7 million workers and soldiers for some kids and moms is a tradeoff I can easily envision being made by Juche-inspired rulers. Or by South Korea if US security guarantees failed.

Imagine you're postwar Ukraine and it ends non-decisively with prospects for another war in the future. Is that price to steep?

My point isn't that Decree 770 was good (to be clear: very bad!). It's that there are a lot of governments to whom it could seem very reasonable.

So I think there are at least two big lessons from Decree 770:
1) Big pronatal policy does actually alter fertility in a big way
2) Even if you do it in a violent and illiberal way, the results may look pretty good to a lot of regimes

And that's why I believe it is extremely pressing for liberal societies to attempt Big Liberal Pronatalism. If we cannot demonstrate the success of Big Liberal Pronatalism, eventually circumstances will conspire to make Decree 770 look increasingly reasonable to many regimes.

Whether governments CAN manipulate fertility is not disputable. They can. We know how. There's an available blueprint and many (though not all) pieces of it are popular among many different current political factions.

The only question is which policy levers governments will think are reasonable options. And I suspect as fertility keeps falling, a lot of governments will attempt a rehabilitation of Decree 770, especially if the rich liberal countries abdicate their world duties.

What are those duties?

We pioneered low fertility. We exported it via ideological colonialism and contraceptive technology transfer and subsidy of access. It is our moral and ethical duty to find a solution to the demographic challenge we created.

Continuing to pillage poor countries as our solution (i.e. don't solve fertility and lean on migration) is an unethical proposal. Promoting policies only available for capital intensive rich countries (i.e. intensify automation) is an unethical proposal.

Until you can find a policy solution that works for Indian states with GDP per capita under $10k (under $5k!) and rapidly falling fertility, you're not engaging with the realm of anti-colonial policy options.

To me, rich-world pronatalism is an ethical imperative because if we don't do it the poorer world will once again be hit by the whiplash tail end of our first mover advantages, just like they have been with everything else.

Picking back up the Romania Decree 770 thread because of the brief discussion by @swinshi in the reason event today. We have cohort fertility data for a lot of Communist countries over the period in question. What does it show?

Well, here we have to bump into a problem.

For causal inference we want nice clean breaks. But cohort fertility isn't like that. A policy implemented in 1967 clearly treats some women differently from others: a woman who is 15 has a different experience of it than if she's 45

How should we deal with that?

One approach I like is to use data on biological fecundability. Women's ability to have live births changes radically over the course of their lives. So policy exposure at age 1 is not the same as 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, 75, etc

Because Decree 770 was in effect for 22 years, it impacted women for different amounts of their reproductive lives, and different specific segments too. What we can do is sum up not just the number of years they were exposed to Decree 770, but sum of YearXFecundability

So, for example, in noncontracepting married couples having regular sex, about 40% will have a birth in a given year at age 25, vs just 10% at 39. Two women, both exposed for 22 years to Decree 770, have different exposures if the exposure was at ages 28-50 vs. 15-37.

This basically gives us a kind of "exogenous variation" in exposure to Decree 770 within Romania, and in comparison to other non-treated countries.

Now, about those non-treated countries.

You may think that it makes most sense to compare Romania with other nearby communst countries. And yes, that makes sense.

But there's a problem with that.

ALL of the communist countries turned pronatal between 1950 and 1980.

In other words, Romania's best comparison countries are actually not strictly "untreated." They adopted SOME pieces of Romania's policy set around the same time.

So, how do cohorts with different exposures compare?

Here, I show how cohort exposure varied across cohorts, and also how the Romania - Comparison group COMPLETED FERTILITY. So this is NOT period/tempo effects!

What you can see is that Romanian relative fertility fell across the 1920-1935 cohorts, cohorts of women who were very lightly or not at all exposed to Decree 770. Also Decree 770 actually *exempted* women with a certain number of kids/over a certain age; I have not controlled...

... for that; that would push those early exposures even lower.

Then, relative Romanian fertility moved way up from the early 1930s birth cohorts to late 1940s birth cohorts. Those 1940s/50s cohorts are the most highly treated cohorts. And look: their fertility is high!

Then over the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s birth cohorts, exposure declines (Decree 770 was repealed relatively early in some of these women's lives), and as a result the fertility effect dissipates. By the 1970s entirely-untreated cohorts, Romania's relative rates are back down.

Here's the same data again, but now chaining to 1935 values so you can see a clearer effect.

At peak effect, Decree 770 increased COMPLETED fertility by between 0.2 and 0.6 kids per woman.

That is a whole lot.

Now, what happens if we DO incorporate the actual program rules of Decree 770? I.e. women over certain ages in certain years were exempted, and women under 25 were not subject to some elements of it? So: zero-treatment over threshold age, and we'll reduce under-25 effects by 1/3

That 1/3 is just a ballpark, but seems reasonable to me since all the punitive taxes and stuff only applied 25 and over.

So first off, these modifications eliminate 20% of the area under the exposure curve, i.e. 20% of the theoretically possible fertility effect.

Here's how the benchmark graph looks compared to our new revised line:

It looks a little more concordant! And not just looks a little more. Here's R values for cohorts 1935-1978. Accounting for a few small policy quirks greatly improves fit.

And that's not all!

Contraception was not actually BANNED until 1985-- it was just informally restricted and the government ensured supplies were very low. If I had some way to instrument that, it'd probably matter too.

Furthermore, women of any age who had 4 or 5 children (varies by year) were also exempted. If I had a way to measure the age-specific share and reduce treatment like that, I suspect it would explain the reduced effect in later years.

My point is, in terms of COMPLETED COHORT FERTILITY, exploiting both biological- and policy-variation in exposure within Romania and cross-country comparisons over cohorts, it suuuuuure looks like Decree 770 had a big fertility effect.

Again, tons of stuff to deprecate about the policy. Not endorsing. Indeed, very much the opposite-- I think it is *because* Decree 770 is bad *that we need* to attempt to make something else work.