0:00:08 let’s start today with some numbers some demographic statistics that i think you’ll
0:00:14 find surprising here’s the first one within 10 years there will likely be more people in the u.s
0:00:22 65 and older than there are people 18 and younger this is a brand new state of affairs and the rest
0:00:29 of the world is following the same path let’s call it the elder swell how can this elder swell
0:00:36 be explained it’s been driven by two big trends lower fertility which we talked about in part one
0:00:42 of this series and a massive increase in life expectancy especially over the past century and
0:00:49 a quarter that is thanks to among other things more abundant food cleaner air and water less war
0:00:54 and vastly better public health and medical care especially the treatment and prevention of diseases
0:01:01 that used to kill so many children but the real headline of the elder swell is not just that more
0:01:06 people will be living more years it’s that those years are expected to be better this is what
0:01:13 researchers call health span versus lifespan let me give you another set of surprising statistics the
0:01:19 international monetary fund recently conducted a study of older people in 41 countries it included both
0:01:25 physical and cognitive testing the researchers found that on average the physical condition of a modern
0:01:34 70 year old corresponds to that of a 56 year old in the year 2000 and a 70 year old person today has the same
0:01:54 cognitive ability as a 53 year old person in 2000 now much of that gain comes from lower income countries which had more catching up to do still it is a remarkable gain in health span over just a couple decades so today on free economics radio how can we prepare for the elder swell
0:02:04 well one of the great achievements of the 20th century is to produce an aging society it’s so weird we see it so negative we’ll look at whether our infrastructure is ready for the elder swell
0:02:11 one of the great promises that the american state makes to its citizens in the 20th century is you will be cared for in your old age
0:02:20 we talked to some longevity scientists i hope that we can shift the average lifespan of the population by 10 to 20 years i think that’s doable with modern science
0:02:29 we’ll hear why innovating in the elder space is still really hard if the winds go against you money can dry up really really quickly
0:02:34 and what’s it like to think about living to 100 when you’re just 27
0:02:39 i don’t think about things that way i will live however long i live
0:02:43 have you done much thinking about how long you’ll live
0:02:46 even if you have it’s probably time to give it a rethink
0:03:03 this is freakonomics radio the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything
0:03:05 with your host steven dubner
0:03:15 how old are you kyla i just turned 27
0:03:21 do you think about yourself being old or not yet
0:03:26 well everybody thinks about death that’s kind of our unconscious all of the time is processing that i think
0:03:31 hey i wasn’t taking you all the way to death i was just asking about the being old part
0:03:35 it’s definitely something i think about in terms of retirement like will i have social security
0:03:40 what will the health care system look like then what will the economy look like
0:03:46 but i think for most people you just focus on the day to day and you’re like okay no i’ll be older one day
0:03:55 i’m speaking with kyla scanlon i am an economic commentator so i do social media videos about the economy
0:04:03 my first book in this economy came out in may 2024 i do a lot of research around the attention economy
0:04:07 specifically focusing on sentiment and how that impacts the real economy
0:04:13 do you want to talk about the phrase you coined the vibe session yeah the vibe session is that study
0:04:18 of why sentiment is diverging from what you could suppose to be economic reality
0:04:22 tell me a little bit about how you became interested in econ in the first place
0:04:30 i studied economics and finance and data analytics at university and then i went out to capital group in
0:04:35 los angeles to work for them what is capital group capital group is an asset management firm so they’re
0:04:41 on the buy side i was in a rotational program there and for me like i grew up in kentucky i didn’t even
0:04:48 know you could major in economics until i got to college and i just was so stunned that we pretend
0:04:52 that people don’t need to know about economics they live in the economy they should understand it
0:05:01 and when we came to you and asked you to do some reporting for us on aging and longevity science and
0:05:07 so on what was your first thought i’m very interested in the demographic crisis we have a bunch of people
0:05:12 who are aging and the fertility rate is below the replacement rate what are we going to do with an aging
0:05:18 population that is clearly having a bunch of health problems how do you take care of a population
0:05:23 when there might not be enough younger people to take care of them so yeah it was a very exciting
0:05:33 issue so kyla scanlon a young economics educator who is excited by the elder swell did some interviews
0:05:40 for this episode hi my name is selene hollywa i am the founder and ceo of loyal loyal is a silicon
0:05:47 valley startup that wants to extend the lifespan and health span of dogs yes well save the dog save the
0:05:57 world was my attempt at branding and marketing it’s a romantic summary of the loyal thesis which is save the
0:06:03 dogs by helping them live longer healthier lives we aren’t working on developing drugs for any specific
0:06:12 disease per se it’s really more about taking your currently relatively healthy albeit aged dog and having
0:06:18 them live longer and healthier i have an 85 pound senior rottweiler at home who i would have brought
0:06:26 but you would have heard her drooling everywhere and this fact of nature is the bigger a dog is the
0:06:32 shorter their average lifespan is when scanlon spoke with hollywa loyal had already raised over 125 million
0:06:40 in funding mostly from venture capital firms on the biology we have two categories of drugs one for a
0:06:45 senior dog lifespan extension that’s more broadly around improving the metabolic fitness of your dog
0:06:53 which is thought to potentially drive their healthy or unhealthy aging specifically translating the biology of
0:06:58 caloric restriction caloric restriction caloric restriction being the most og way so to speak
0:07:05 to extend lifespan it was first shown in the 1920s so we’re trying to basically emulate and target the
0:07:08 downstream pathways that we believe are activated by caloric restriction that lead to this lifespan
0:07:15 extension importantly without you a having to give your dog less food and b without your dog not
0:07:19 wanting to eat everyone always asks me why not just do a zen pick for dogs and it’s because
0:07:24 the whole treat feeding relationship is actually super important to the dog human relationship
0:07:29 nobody wants a dog that doesn’t care about treats anymore because it’s the reward mechanism exactly
0:07:34 it’s super important for bonding for training and honestly i think a lot of what we interpret as our
0:07:41 dogs loving us is our dogs begging us for food oh no speaking as somebody who owns a dog who is a big
0:07:47 food monster like i am extremely guilty of this i have a dog too and she’s the same and the second
0:07:54 category is around big dog short lifespan specifically trying to compensate for what we think are the
0:08:00 genetic changes that people inadvertently bred for when they were selectively breeding dogs to be very
0:08:06 very large the thought being that growth hormone drives the dogs to grow really really fast in puberty
0:08:11 which is great if you’re a big dog person you don’t have a medium dane or a small dane you want a great dane
0:08:17 but unfortunately in dogs this process doesn’t turn off sufficiently once they’re fully grown which
0:08:24 we hypothesize causes them to age faster and die sooner so the drug what it does is dampens down the
0:08:30 levels of this growth hormone that’s circulating in these dogs blood to a level that’s seen in healthy
0:08:40 smaller breed dogs you could imagine there are people who hear loyal’s slogan save the dogs save the world
0:08:48 and think well sure because dogs are great and the average dog is maybe more likable than the average
0:08:55 person but celine hollywa is really focused on the save the world part of the equation this was something i thought
0:09:03 about a lot especially when i was starting loyal which was how do you have impact on societal norms
0:09:09 public policy etc when you don’t really have a lot of money and influence i was 23 or 24 when i started
0:09:16 loyal i think the way loyal will have its impact is by normalizing it culturally if you can go to your vet
0:09:23 and get your dog prescribed a drug to keep them healthier longer you’re inevitably going to ask well why can’t
0:09:29 i do this for my grandma the reason i started the company was to get the first drug fda approved for
0:09:36 lifespan and healthspan extension it’ll help us quote-unquote save the world aka help work on human
0:09:43 longevity and human quality of life too how do you think about the ethical considerations of longevity work
0:09:50 i’m definitely not an immortalist i’m not trying to make people live to 150 or a thousand i just think
0:09:55 longevity and lifespan extension drugs are a kind of sexy way to talk about preventative medicine for
0:10:00 age-related diseases which i think is actually one of the most important things that we could do
0:10:06 for society obviously acute care for age-related diseases is extremely important we’ll always do it
0:10:13 but the most efficient way so to speak to treat these really complex diseases is prevention so that’s
0:10:18 really what i’m trying to work on i’m hoping we can prove our point in dogs and help a lot of dogs
0:10:23 but i think this could be one of the most valuable things in human medicine too
0:10:30 how did we get here to a world where firms with backing from venture capitalists
0:10:36 are chasing fda approval for longevity drugs for dogs in order to get the same for people
0:10:42 american society today has an age pyramid that was not imagined before
0:10:46 that is james chappell he is a history professor at duke university
0:10:52 in the 17th 18th 19th centuries it’s not like there were no older people but it was two or three or four percent
0:10:55 we’re looking at twenty percent we’re looking at a massive growth
0:11:02 despite a setback during covid the average life expectancy at birth in the u.s. is roughly 78 and a half years
0:11:09 for females lifespan is around 81 years and it’s around 75 for men if you go back to 1950 the average
0:11:17 was 68.2 full 10 years less and if you go all the way back to 1900 life expectancy was 47
0:11:23 james chappell is only 42 years old so how did he get interested in the elder swell
0:11:30 i’m from florida i grew up surrounded by older people and it just struck me as bizarre that there
0:11:37 was so little historical writing about this the gap i’m trying to fill is a narrative about how
0:11:44 american society as a whole has grappled with old age not only as an economic problem but also as an
0:11:50 issue of expanded leisure time and the environment and things like that so chappell wrote a book to
0:11:57 fill in that narrative it’s called golden years how americans invented and reinvented old age compared to
0:12:02 the other problems that america faces like child poverty or racial inequality older people are doing
0:12:08 reasonably well there have been massive expansions of the state in the 1930s and 1960s to care for older
0:12:14 people and they’ve worked i mean old age poverty is relatively low in his book chappell writes about
0:12:21 earlier ideas for elder care schemes including a 1933 proposal called the townsend plan which was promoted
0:12:28 by a california physician named francis townsend some people think it was a crackpot carnival barker scheme
0:12:34 some people think it was a beautiful utopian dream the idea was that as soon as you turn 60
0:12:39 no matter what job you had if you’re a man or woman black or white whatever it is you would get
0:12:45 a certain pension from the government every month and it was gonna be large the money was coming from where
0:12:50 basically from general tax revenues it was not from contributions from your paycheck and there was
0:12:58 another stipulation that you had to spend all the money that month so it’s sort of a wacky scheme
0:13:02 they tried it out they found some older people and just gave them all this money to see what they would
0:13:09 do they got haircuts and fur coats and things like that the idea was this is a way to spur consumption
0:13:14 and that would help the american economy also like a universal basic income for old people
0:13:20 absolutely so it’s maybe a crackpot scheme what made it a beautiful one is the egalitarianism of it
0:13:28 it truly was for everyone it had millions and millions of older people energized around this movement
0:13:33 franklin roosevelt didn’t like it though did he no this was very much not franklin roosevelt’s
0:13:39 kind of policymaking it was enormously expensive of course it was very untested
0:13:44 roosevelt and his team preferred to do versions of things they had seen done before especially in
0:13:50 europe roosevelt creates a team the committee on economic security and he gets people like
0:13:56 francis perkins a very serious respected reformer a female secretary of labor that’s right the first
0:14:03 female cabinet secretary period yes it’s got to be yes and they put together a plan which looks like
0:14:08 what we now call social security it does not bear any resemblance to either what the socialists wanted or
0:14:13 what the townsendites wanted it was a much more conservative vision where it’s not for everyone
0:14:19 it is for people who have worked in certain sectors of the economy and have paid these contributions to
0:14:23 the state taking out of their paycheck and then when they turn 65 the amount they got back would be
0:14:30 indexed to how much they put in you praise social security generally in the book and say it’s worked and
0:14:36 it helped create the entire state of modern retirement but if you think about just the basic economic
0:14:42 setup of it it’s so inefficient in so many ways that no economist would ever dream up a plan like
0:14:47 that today would they it’s got too much lag in it it’s got too much variance do you still embrace
0:14:52 the construct of the program well yes it depends on what you think the alternative would be if i could
0:14:58 design a system from scratch is this what i or most economists now or to be honest even in the 1930s
0:15:05 would have designed probably not there are i think systems even in europe today that are more egalitarian
0:15:12 much simpler to administer i mean social security is so complicated but given what we know about american
0:15:20 history was the alternative a rational egalitarian system or was the alternative nothing at all i think
0:15:26 the alternative was probably nothing at all so how does all this dovetail with our health care system
0:15:31 and the creation of medicare the medical system that we now know today where like you go to the hospital
0:15:38 and you encounter amazing technology that’s being born after world war ii very high health care costs this is
0:15:44 sinking older people who are largely on fixed incomes so the social security administration starts arguing for something
0:15:49 like medicare what a lot of people wanted was simply universal health care what we did instead
0:15:58 was we linked health insurance mainly with our employers it makes a smidgen of sense in this moment in the late 1940s
0:16:06 does it make sense in 2024 of course not one of the externalities of linking health care with employers
0:16:11 is that what about people who are unemployed so people who are middle-aged and unemployed
0:16:16 in general in american history no one cares about them what about all these millions of older people who
0:16:22 worked good jobs they did their best they’re on social security they are left out of this new system of
0:16:29 health insurance and so medicare emerges to fill this gap it is passed in 1965 it’s part of johnson’s great
0:16:37 society legislation so here’s something you wrote between 1935 and 1975 old age security was arguably next
0:16:43 to military might the central preoccupation of american policy you write about the passage of the social
0:16:48 security act medicare and medicaid act but additionally you write that every year legislation streamed from
0:16:55 washington that addressed problems in housing nutrition and care for older people it just astonishes me
0:17:05 that so much effort was put into a policy framework that was forward-looking in a way that we don’t think of
0:17:10 policy making often these days can you explain why that happened it’s a little hard to explain to be honest
0:17:16 i would say first coming out of world war ii america is gearing up to fight the cold war
0:17:21 and they have to show that the american system has something to offer that the soviets are wrong
0:17:28 this is not simply a dog-eat-dog world where the poor go to die and the rich tycoons drive over their bones
0:17:34 we have to offer something one thing that makes old age an interesting bipartisan area of concern
0:17:41 is that it’s not really very socialist most reforms you can imagine and that people were proposing have
0:17:46 some kind of link with the socialist tradition or with trade unions or the working class or economic
0:17:52 inequality to pursue them is to criticize the system of american capitalism old age isn’t like that
0:17:58 you can be in favor of serious old age benefits without making any claims at all about the justice
0:18:06 or injustice of american capitalism it’s also not a special interest group really because it is of all
0:18:13 the categories of need one that barring catastrophe all of us one day inhabit american policymakers knew they
0:18:22 had to be doing something and this seemed like the safest area to pour really tremendous levels of resources
0:18:29 i think we need another period of innovation in this space because social security and medicare have not really
0:18:35 been touched and they are old i mean medicare is 60 years old now think how much the health care space has changed
0:18:42 what sort of innovations would you like to see well i like most people like polls show like 80 or 90 percent of people
0:18:49 would like to see modest reforms to at the very least save social security it’s one of the astonishing parts of the american
0:18:58 political system that a very popular program is about to hit financial trouble in 12 or 13 years and the political will to
0:19:07 address this is just non-existent the bills are in congress they’re relatively easy increase taxes on higher earners move
0:19:12 around the social security earnings limit and this problem can be resolved this is the biggest poverty reduction
0:19:18 program in the country it’s eminently fixable and it gets harder to fix every year we settle into what
0:19:24 is now the very familiar dynamic where democrats all they want to do is quote-unquote defend social security
0:19:31 and medicare and the right either doesn’t talk about it at all or has these fantastical dreams of privatization
0:19:38 that creates a dynamic where the right is trying to attack the left is trying to defend and no one is trying to improve
0:19:44 these systems which is what is actually required well some people do say that older voters have too much
0:19:51 leverage and that it’s often exercised at the expense of children and others that’s a pretty common argument
0:19:56 that people trot out i think that there’s been a lot of unfortunate discourse about gerontocracy and the
0:20:01 power of older voters because i really do not think that that’s true social security and medicare were not passed by
0:20:08 older voters the aarp was not pushing for these things the congress that passes medicare is one of the youngest
0:20:14 congresses in american history it had less republican than democratic support but it did have significant
0:20:20 republican support and i would say support by people in numerous age brackets in fact political scientists
0:20:25 have shown that it’s really middle-aged people who are pushing for these things and a young congress members
0:20:32 the reason is that these were understood at the time not as sops to the special interest old age lobby
0:20:39 but as a way to secure and stabilize the families of middle-aged people because who’s actually in
0:20:44 danger if you know if grandma falls it’s unfortunate for grandma but it’s really unfortunate for grandma’s
0:20:50 four kids who have to leave their jobs and things like that so keeping in mind the advances of social
0:20:57 security and medicare and other policy that aim to help older people talk about how modern retirement
0:21:02 came to be a thing it’s easy to take for granted that this is the way it’s always been but it was
0:21:08 shocking to me reading your book how recent the phenomenon that we now see as normal wasn’t at all
0:21:14 normal for most people the fact that we have an expectation that i like my job but at some point i’m
0:21:20 going to stop doing it and i would like to hang out with my kids and do some hobbies and service work for
0:21:28 10 or 15 years before i die this is a very recent expectation for most of human history there is no
0:21:33 such thing as a formal exit from the labor force into retirement let alone one where you could rely
0:21:39 on some kind of payments either from your employer or from the state the basic timeline is that in the
0:21:47 50s about 60 65 percent of older men are working by the 80s it’s more like 20 25 percent wow it more
0:21:53 less has stayed stable since then and it’s not just that you stop working and hang out in your house
0:21:59 there is a huge infrastructure of retirement that’s created senior centers and senior citizens discounts
0:22:05 and aarp cruises all that stuff emerges really quickly over this period one thing that’s very
0:22:10 interesting about the emergence of retirement after world war ii is that a lot of workers did not want it
0:22:18 it was not really a demand of labor unions or the working class many workers even in jobs that seem to
0:22:24 us exploitative or dangerous workers want to stay in those jobs and so there’s a lot of resistance in
0:22:30 the 50s and 60s to the creation of retirement especially in this country to mandatory retirement
0:22:35 mandatory retirement was actually a pretty big part of the american economy in the 60s and 70s
0:22:43 lots of workers and lots of fields were forced to retire when they turned 65 americans hated that that was
0:22:51 one of the aarp’s first big causes it becomes illegal in the 80s in most fields so your main argument is that
0:22:58 we had this massive boom in life expectancy mostly over the 20th century which resulted in a lot more
0:23:07 older people and that the boom is not just continuing but accelerating now and you argue that we’ve adapted
0:23:12 generally pretty well with policies including social security and medicare and so on in other words if you just
0:23:19 want to look at the 20th century in total you could say wow those were some really significant positive
0:23:29 solutions to this growing issue that brings us to now though 21st century where do you think we stand
0:23:36 what are the headwinds has progress stalled and what do you see as proposed solutions the issue of the
0:23:42 booming population of 80 plus older people who need care has been persistently viewed as a kind of
0:23:49 afterthought like something that can be solved with very precarious sectors of the economy and by squeezing
0:23:54 as much labor out of middle-aged women as possible and i think there’s a possible world where we say
0:24:03 actually no this is going to be a major and dignified part of our economy it’s going to be well regulated
0:24:08 it does seem to me that progress in this area has stalled what i would say more specifically is that
0:24:14 progress has shifted to the private sector so to take for example assisted living facilities these
0:24:21 are in innovation in america in the 1980s like so much of what america does with old age policy it’s
0:24:26 something that european socialists came up with that was meant to be government funded and then americans
0:24:31 copied it and made it private insofar as there has been serious government action in the last two decades
0:24:37 it’s often been to empower private industry even further something like medicare part c and the
0:24:43 introduction of medicare advantage plans it’s basically about giving private insurers a bigger role
0:24:50 to play in health care for older people it’s looking at the older population essentially as a market that can
0:24:57 be divided up among private players yes that’s right and not as a category of need that we all share
0:25:02 and that therefore the government should be involved in one of the great promises that the american state
0:25:07 makes to its citizens in the 20th century is you will be cared for in your old age this is a capitalist
0:25:14 country you’re going to work hard in middle age but once you hit 65 or 67 you can relax a little bit
0:25:19 you’ve earned it i think in the 21st century our business should not be to roll back promises that
0:25:23 were made a century ago we should be thinking about how to secure them for the future
0:25:31 james chappell brings a historian’s toolkit to the elder swell coming up after the break how does an
0:25:36 economist think about it i’m stephen dubner this is free economics radio we’ll be right back
0:25:54 before the break we heard about the economic scaffolding that was erected decades ago for older americans but
0:25:59 there are a lot more older americans today than there used to be so it’s natural to wonder just
0:26:07 how sturdy that scaffolding is here’s one indicator in 1965 there were four workers for every beneficiary
0:26:14 of social security that number is now less than three and it continues to shrink meanwhile the trump
0:26:20 administration has made major staffing cuts at the social security administration even as more people than
0:26:27 more than ever are filing for benefits and with trump’s big beautiful bill taking aim at medicare and medicaid
0:26:34 it’s fair to say that the sturdiness of the scaffolding going forward is at best uncertain and it’s not just here
0:26:39 many countries around the world are dealing with the same problem so it’s time to bring on
0:26:45 an economist to help us sort this out his name is andrew scott i’m an economics professor at london
0:26:51 business school and these days i’m somewhat obsessed with the topic of longevity scott began his career
0:26:56 in various advisory roles for the uk government including in the house of commons the bank of england
0:27:01 and the treasury i do all the things you think a macroeconomist should focus on the monetary policy
0:27:07 fiscal policy financial stuff and then i got a little bit bored there’s only so many times you
0:27:13 can talk about interest rates going up or going down and so he became a professor one of the joys of
0:27:16 working in a business school you’re always talking about those big trends that are going to change the
0:27:21 world and so you’re not just talking about interest rates you’re talking about globalization and
0:27:27 artificial intelligence i used to give this lecture on an aging society and it was pretty miserable you
0:27:32 just project for these endless numbers of old people old people are seen as a problem they get
0:27:37 ill they need a pension and then halfway through this lecture on aging society there was a slide that said
0:27:42 hey on average we’re living longer and we’re healthier for longer and i thought that sounds quite
0:27:48 good how we turn that into a bad news story this led to scott writing a book called the longevity
0:27:54 imperative how to build a healthier and more productive society to support our longer lives
0:28:01 the book opens with the story of scott’s identical twin brother david who died a few days after they
0:28:10 were born in 1965 in london that year the most common age of death in the uk what’s called the modal
0:28:20 age was between zero and one today the modal age is 87 you did not mishear me the most common age of
0:28:27 death in the uk today is 87 it’s the same in the u.s one of the great achievements of the 20th century is
0:28:33 to produce an aging society it’s so weird we see it so negative it’s morning loss of fewer children it’s
0:28:37 fewer parents snatched away in midlife it’s more grandparents meeting grandchildren and all we can do
0:28:42 a term and say oh my goodness we have an aging society i mean it’s quite extraordinary so i have
0:28:49 a feeling i know how you will answer the following question but i’m going to ask it anyway is aging a
0:28:53 privilege or a curse well it’s a privilege i’ll come at it from a very simple economic point of view
0:29:00 which is that an increase in life expectancy means we have more time and for most people that’s a good
0:29:07 thing so what do we fear about it we fear out living our health our wealth our skills our purpose
0:29:11 and our relationships those are a lot of things to fear it sounds like you’re about to help us supersede
0:29:17 that fear somehow are you a magician well no we fear getting old so what are you going to do now to age
0:29:24 better that’s never been an imperative before when there’s only a 10 chance of making it to 90 you don’t
0:29:30 say i’m going to spend my 30s 40s and 50s preparing for a long life now we have to it’s a radical moment
0:29:36 in human history because we’ve never had to support such a length of life you write in your book about
0:29:41 what you call an evergreen economy i was thinking about that recently because i was in florida where
0:29:49 you see an awful lot of businesses devoted to the aging there’s all kinds of medical facilities
0:29:55 classic car treatments there’s golf you know it’s a lot of things that we associate with aging longevity
0:30:00 retirement and so on so that’s you know an obvious tip of the iceberg but when you take a step back and
0:30:08 look at the bigger evergreen economy everything from labor forces pension health care etc how do you
0:30:14 expect it to be substantially different my big thing is to focus on a longevity society rather
0:30:18 than an aging society and i know immediately what happens when i see a consultant talking about an
0:30:23 aging society they start talking about the burden and then they start talking about cruise ships and
0:30:28 care homes and the market potential what i call the silver economy all of which is valid all of which
0:30:33 is true there are a lot more older people and the baby boomers mean there’s even more older people
0:30:38 because that was such a large cohort for me the evergreen economy is about how to remain fit
0:30:43 and healthy throughout my life so we should see a shift towards people eating more healthily which
0:30:48 we’re not seeing everywhere but we’re beginning to see it’s going to be about how you do lifelong
0:30:53 learning it’s going to be about how you can support working for longer i think that’s a really really
0:30:59 big change because in the 20th century we invented a three-stage life education work retirement as we’re
0:31:05 living longer and longer and longer we can’t just stretch out that three-stage life let’s take the case of
0:31:10 retirement retirement to be honest is already gone the notion that there is a single age where everyone
0:31:17 comes to a hard stop of work has already disappeared some people retire at 60 some people retire at 70
0:31:23 some people go part-time then they retire then they’re going to un-retire we’re seeing a much more
0:31:30 complicated pattern one barrier to a lot of older people working longer is that they’re not wanted
0:31:35 their skills are considered outdated whether that’s accurate or not a lot of younger people honestly
0:31:40 just don’t want to be around older people in the workplace and elsewhere how ageist would you say
0:31:46 we are as a modern society and assuming the answer is at least a little bit what are your suggestions for
0:31:51 shifting that there’s clearly all sorts of ageism around and one of the ironies is that the more old people
0:31:56 there are and the more likely the young are to become old the more ageist we seem to be
0:32:01 ageism is that weird prejudice against your future self it’s very strange i get a little trouble here
0:32:06 because i think you know if i tell you that over the last 10 years in high-income countries the majority
0:32:11 of employment growth has come from older workers i read this in your book i was shocked and everyone
0:32:16 is and the share in the uk is absurdly high yes and europe even higher so in the us it’s about
0:32:21 about 60 percent uk it’s about 75 percent and in europe it’s over 100 percent just to be clear this
0:32:27 is the growth of labor among age cohorts yes yeah so if you look at the increase in total employment
0:32:33 and say which age groups have seen an increase it’s older workers it’s a mixture of more likely to work
0:32:39 and more of them let me just push on that date a little bit how low of a base were we working off of
0:32:43 there it’s not like i’m playing around with people aged over 80 where of course you’ve got a very low
0:32:49 base this is from 50 plus we underestimate the capacity of old people that’s the ageism part
0:32:53 and of course if we underestimate the capacity of old people and more and more of our life is going to
0:32:58 come up later years and more and more of the population is going to be older people we’ve got
0:33:03 a real problem if we then under invest and cut them out because we get the very bad aging society story
0:33:08 that we worry about so we have to adapt to living longer by being healthy and productive for longer
0:33:12 mick jagger’s the one everyone points out he’s 80 performing on stage you’re seeing age stereotypes
0:33:18 being challenged and some people adapting but there’s another issue which is that most people
0:33:23 excluding you and me and some people we know because we happen to toil in fields that we chose
0:33:28 and that we enjoy at least i do you seem to as well most people around the world don’t enjoy their work
0:33:34 so for those who don’t how do you think about that balance the problem we’ve got is that we do as we’re
0:33:39 living longer need to get people to work for longer so how do we redesign work to give people
0:33:44 opportunities to carry on working i’m very keen on the notion of age-friendly jobs can you give me a
0:33:48 for instance well they’ve got the following characteristics they’re less physical they’re
0:33:54 more flexible and they give you more autonomy so professor’s great tour guide’s another one
0:33:58 everyone likes jobs that are more flexible have more autonomy aren’t very physical but older people
0:34:03 really like it in the sense they’re prepared take a bigger cut in salary to do those jobs
0:34:06 so really important we create those because you’ve got to make sure that you ease the competition
0:34:10 between older workers and younger workers you don’t create institutional blockages
0:34:15 now there’s been a huge increase in the number of these age-friendly jobs just the way the labor
0:34:19 market is going but of course if you’re a construction worker you do not work in an age-friendly job
0:34:25 so how at 50 do you help someone who’s been a construction worker shift into an age-friendly
0:34:30 job that to me has to be a really important labor market policy because there’s loads of skills that
0:34:35 people have my father-in-law was american he was a truck driver he stopped work too early there are
0:34:39 lots of things he could have done he’d have been brilliant at it’s got great people skills we’ve got to
0:34:46 help people with these shifts so in your book you propose three major policy ideas for countries to
0:34:52 achieve this longevity dividend that you call it including raising the proportion of people working
0:34:57 in the years running up to retirement boosting productivity of older workers and increasing the
0:35:04 retirement age so let’s talk politics how do you see reconciling the needs you’re prescribing
0:35:10 with the realities of our political discourse at the moment on the politics i wouldn’t start with
0:35:14 raising the state pension age actually quite annoys me at the moment that that’s what governments are
0:35:21 trying to do because not everyone can work for longer that’s why i absolutely focus on 50 to 65
0:35:27 there’s a huge economic gain to be had to that in the us if you could slow half that rate of decline
0:35:32 eight percent of people age 50 are working a third by 65 if you could half that that gives you four
0:35:38 percent of gdp every single year that’s a huge uplift in terms of resources then you can start worrying
0:35:43 about how i actually sort of raise the state pension age later but what we’ve got to do is not make
0:35:49 people work for longer but support them working longer that has to be about health it has to be about
0:35:55 skills and providing the age-friendly jobs and if you don’t do that you cannot raise the state pension age
0:36:01 there is this community of relatively small but quite prominent longevity hackers or you know scientists
0:36:06 who are trying to really push the boundaries what do you think of that movement do you think there are
0:36:11 useful things that will come out of it or is it a kind of strange fantasy land or somewhere in between
0:36:17 yeah it’s a broad church isn’t it what’s really interesting about that group is that they’ve picked up on
0:36:23 the malleability of age maybe they take it to extremes but you know we’re so wedded to thinking
0:36:29 about chronological age and about chronological age it’s backward looking not forward looking so it
0:36:34 misses the fact that actually a 65 year old today is different from a 65 year old 30 years ago because
0:36:40 of more years to go the other great thing i think they are focusing on is that you know we’ve got a
0:36:45 disease approach to health at the moment but just as in psychology had the positive psychology movement
0:36:52 said look let’s focus on what keeps people mentally well and happy as we’re living longer it is an
0:36:58 aging process that is this biggest risk factor behind multiple diseases the key thing about prevention is
0:37:04 focusing on a biomarker could be these obesity drugs it could be your sugar levels it could be some
0:37:10 biological process of aging if you can slow that down you postpone getting diseases in other words you stay
0:37:18 healthier for longer if you had the authority to remake a big wealthy country’s health care system
0:37:23 maybe it’s the us maybe it’s uk with the same amount of spending currently what are the first few things
0:37:28 you do the first thing is about the same amount of spending because unfortunately i think you’ve still
0:37:32 got to deal with the current disease burden because you can’t just say to people i’m not going to treat
0:37:35 you all right do you want me to give you an extra trillion dollars and i mean the u.s spends about
0:37:40 four trillion on health care let’s say i install you in the u.s despite your citizenship
0:37:45 and say i’m going to give you an extra 25 of total health care spending what are a few things that you
0:37:50 think would address the issues that you see down the road well by the way let me do the politicians
0:37:55 trick and say i’m sure i can find efficiency gains to give you that’s what they said about the nhs and
0:37:59 that didn’t work out so well i do think you’ve got a ring fence prevention and we talk about the nhs
0:38:04 nhs is set up to do intervention there are lots of treatable things like your heart disease for instance
0:38:10 diabetes looks increasingly likely another one where if you intervene early enough you can actually
0:38:16 prevent or postpone certain diseases so i would go for two or three key vaccines what would you most
0:38:21 want those vaccines to cover cardiovascular disease because cardiovascular disease links
0:38:26 in diabetes it links into dementia so let me have those as the three that i would go for there’s a whole
0:38:33 bunch of screening genetic testing all of which i think should be feasible with ai and big data that’s what the
0:38:40 the next few years are going to bring do any or many governments have a target for healthy life
0:38:46 expectancy and if not should they i’m so glad you asked i think it’s crazy i mean in my country the
0:38:51 biggest health target is the waiting list of operations which is barely any relationship with
0:38:57 health whatsoever health systems have to try and focus on a measure of healthy life expectancy i mean
0:39:02 we’ve got to construct it it’s difficult but heck we focus on gdp that’s difficult to measure so i think we can
0:39:08 do it i would make the social security age dependent upon that measure of healthy life expectancy i do
0:39:13 not think it is socially fair to demand people to work for longer if they’re not healthier for longer
0:39:19 that gives ministries a financed incentive to invest in health because right now most ministries look at the
0:39:23 health budget as a cost and say i’m don’t care how you spend the money i’m just going to minimize how
0:39:28 much i give you we’ve got to recognize that actually if we can invest in health and we spend money in
0:39:34 prevention we get good outcomes every economist will say we know health is one of the most important
0:39:40 things in our life we also know that interventions that keep us healthy but also enable us to create
0:39:45 resources that we can use over our life are particularly valuable and i think we’re going to bring much more in
0:39:48 that health and economic perspective and how we allocate money
0:39:57 most governments are not yet focused on allocating resources to longevity as andrew scott would like
0:40:04 to see but the private sector is coming up after the break kyla scanlon talks to some innovators who
0:40:11 are going right past dog longevity and straight to the humans i’m stephen dubner this is freakonomics radio
0:40:11 we’ll be right back
0:40:27 there is a growing body of research showing that some pharmaceuticals including glp1 treatments like
0:40:34 ozempic and wagovi may have longevity benefits beyond their intended use but the fda has not
0:40:41 approved any drugs that specifically target longevity it’s hard to imagine that won’t change eventually but
0:40:48 the fda may have to change first the agency doesn’t currently classify aging as a disease which means
0:40:55 the regulatory path to drug approval is not smooth that’s why loyal ceo selene hollywa who kyla
0:41:02 skanlon spoke with earlier is trying to get fda approval for her dog drugs as a first step but
0:41:07 there are plenty of other startups out there that are going straight for the humans my name is katie
0:41:14 fike and i am the co-founder of aging 2.0 and a managing partner of generator ventures fike’s
0:41:21 venture capital firm is focused on investments in aging and aging 2.0 is a networking and founders
0:41:28 program for startups in that space kyla skanlon interviewed katie fike and asked how she got
0:41:33 into the longevity business i was working for lehman brothers on the morning of september 11th
0:41:39 in the world financial center i’d actually been there until about three in the morning the night before
0:41:44 working on stuff that was quote very important i came in that morning around eight it was kind of a
0:41:49 normal morning and then obviously things quickly became very abnormal i stayed in the building after
0:41:55 the first plane had hit and then we were told to evacuate after the second one obviously it was a
0:42:01 really traumatic experience i was 21 years old i had this kind of pit of my stomach feeling that i wanted
0:42:07 the work that i did to matter more not less when real life happened all this stuff that i’d been
0:42:14 pulling all-nighters for just really didn’t seem to matter anymore and a few months after september
0:42:21 11th my mom sent me a article and then a book by an md geriatrician named bill thomas that book changed my
0:42:27 life fike went back to school and wound up getting a phd in gerontology from the university of southern
0:42:33 california i had started my life in the tech and finance world and then i moved over into gerontology
0:42:39 and i realized that these worlds were just so separated the people in aging care services the
0:42:45 ones who really understood the needs didn’t know the people who were creating the apps or creating the
0:42:50 business models the people who were launching new startup companies didn’t even know about some of the
0:42:56 opportunities that were hiding in plain sight in the aging space and so what we did with aging 2.0
0:43:01 to start was getting those same people in the room sometimes people would want to put us in a little
0:43:05 box you know and think like oh that’s pretty niche we would say well if it’s more comfortable for you
0:43:11 you could just think about aging as the fastest growing highest utilizing most expensive consumers
0:43:18 of our health care system i remember one doctor used to say if you’re not a pediatrician or an ob-gyn
0:43:23 you’re effectively a gerontologist it’s interesting how many people don’t consider this market but
0:43:29 you’ve also talked about the technology you know tweaking existing services like uber and tinder
0:43:36 and helping those be useful tools for seniors could you talk through how you think about these mainstream
0:43:41 tech platforms and how we could adapt some of this technology for older adults
0:43:46 the uber for seniors or the tinder for seniors it starts to get a little similar to what traditional
0:43:51 vcs often ask entrepreneurs which is well what if google decides to do that tomorrow or what if amazon
0:43:55 decides to end at this market that’s a worthwhile question for entrepreneurs to think about when they’re
0:44:01 trying to think about should i leverage an existing technology or an existing model and bring it over
0:44:07 into the senior care space because you’re often competing against really well-funded incumbents what’s
0:44:11 what’s often tricky about mentioning what are some of the most successful companies with aging
0:44:17 some of the most successful ones have done it so discreetly that it’s kind of hard to point out
0:44:21 who they are and the exact reason they’re having success is because they’re doing it discreetly and not
0:44:28 so overtly i think apple is actually a fantastic example of that where apple has really focused on you know
0:44:35 good design really good customer service if you walk by an apple store you will often see who’s at the
0:44:41 genius bar might skew a little bit older but they haven’t made this you know the help bar for seniors
0:44:47 it’s just apple frankly even being able to walk into a store in the first place is a very ageless and
0:44:54 age-friendly tactic could you talk through what you look for in a pitch and how you balance this commercial
0:45:00 aspect of how do you make money and the social impact of a potential investment in terms of the
0:45:06 commercial side we look at a lot of the same things that traditional investors would look at around any
0:45:13 pitch a strong team a large total available market good product market fit depending on what stage you’re
0:45:20 at ideally some early customers it’s really important to see an entrepreneur who’s humble
0:45:26 who has high eq who has strong empathy and who’s willing to listen we saw a lot of money get wasted
0:45:32 and time get wasted by entrepreneurs who had their blinders on thought they understood the solution and
0:45:37 really were not hearing the feedback they were getting from the market or from the customer
0:45:46 scanlan also interviewed kristen fortney co-founder and ceo of a biopharma company called bio age we’re
0:45:52 focused on aging biology and therapies that can ultimately help aging that’s not by itself an
0:45:57 investable prospect partly because there are no medicines that are approved for that right now
0:46:02 what would the fda regulatory path even look like what would reimbursement even look like
0:46:08 still bio age raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital firms and they went public in
0:46:15 2024 bio age has two drugs in development one to fight obesity the other for metabolic disease and
0:46:22 inflammation here is kyla scanlan speaking with fortney could you just talk through why you chose to
0:46:29 focus on aging and your path toward co-founding bio age i deliberately went into the field because i was
0:46:34 so excited by what it could mean for human health there’s all these different ways now that we can
0:46:41 make for example a mouse live 30 longer 40 longer what’s exciting is that it’s not just living longer
0:46:46 it’s living healthier longer so in these animals you’re delaying cancer you’re delaying cardiovascular
0:46:51 disease what would that mean if we could do something similar for people it could potentially have a much
0:46:56 larger impact than going after diseases one at a time can you talk about the industry at large you know
0:47:01 just it being like a volatile space and how you think about the longevity of longevity companies
0:47:06 the funding environment and biotech has been especially challenging the past couple years that’s in
0:47:11 contrast to 2021 for example when a lot of companies were going public a lot of big rounds were being
0:47:17 done there’s pros and cons right everybody today will be like well we’re only investing in the good
0:47:23 companies and everyone was crazy back then i think what’s suffering right now is the more innovative
0:47:30 approaches which are riskier there’s still a lot of good science being funded but a lot of it is
0:47:35 building another drug for the same target very de-risked science can you talk about the de-risking
0:47:40 what’s relevant for bio age is that there’s still a few therapeutic areas where people are willing to take
0:47:46 big swings and one of those is obesity with the incretin drugs you know zap bound wagabee these are
0:47:52 really unprecedented markets in biotech and these medicines they’re really gen one right they’re
0:47:57 these first injectable drugs that are having dramatic effects not just on weight loss but on incidence of
0:48:04 disease so everyone is very willing to finance additional exploration of this exciting new space
0:48:10 for example our drug which mimics the effects of apolin it’s a pill that you can take once a day
0:48:14 that should improve weight loss and also can potentially improve body composition
0:48:21 everyone in the obesity space would love to have a pill version of one of these injectable drugs there’s
0:48:27 several of them being developed right now i went back to kyla scanlon after she did these interviews
0:48:33 to ask her how much investing momentum there is in the longevity space what’s challenging for
0:48:39 investors about the longevity space is that it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money
0:48:44 two things that venture capitalists don’t really like they like to allocate as little money as
0:48:51 possible and have things go as quickly as possible and the ceos of these more traditional longevity
0:48:58 companies are like we don’t like how sparkly the space has gotten because it distracts from what
0:49:04 anti-aging really is which is just preventative it’s not about turning into a superhuman i think
0:49:09 investors like the sparkle aspect of it but once they realize how hard it is to actually do good science
0:49:19 it might not be as interesting and just how hard is it to do good science bio age recently halted clinical
0:49:25 trials of their drug azeloprag when we reached out for an explanation they said bio age made the decision
0:49:31 to discontinue the azeloprag trial after observing unexpected liver enzyme elevations in some patients
0:49:36 receiving the drug while these elevations were not accompanied by any clinically significant symptoms the
0:49:43 safety profile of the drug was no longer suitable for obesity treatment another of their drugs targeting
0:49:50 neuroinflammation will have clinical results later this year and bio age recently announced collaborations
0:49:56 with novartis and eli lily still at one point bio age had a market capitalization of more than six
0:50:04 hundred million dollars now it’s down to around 150 million dollars and how about loyal the dog longevity
0:50:11 company founded by selene hollywa they’ve raised another 22 million dollars since kyla scanlon spoke
0:50:16 with hollywa and they’ve got a thousand dogs enrolled in a study to test their drug that is intended to
0:50:25 help older dogs live longer a few months ago that drug got its preliminary efficacy approval from the fda the first
0:50:32 of three steps needed for fda conditional approval i asked kyla scanlon if she would want to give her dog
0:50:39 loyal’s new life extending drug oh my goodness my dog was just diagnosed with cancer so i would do
0:50:46 anything in the world to give my dog a longer life it is interesting like how i think about her life relative to my life i’m like
0:50:55 you have to live until you’re a hundred but you know my dog is a pit boxer mix she’s on the larger side and this is what selene talked
0:51:01 about in the interviews larger dogs are just they’re prone to dying a bit earlier and so i’m seeing selene’s
0:51:08 research and the whole thesis behind her company play out in my dog how long do you expect to live
0:51:16 i don’t think about things that way i will live however long i live yeah do you have a
0:51:23 a number that you would consider i’ll put this in quotes a success well it’s always a bummer about
0:51:30 my personality as i’m too philosophical and i read too much carl young and so death is just the next
0:51:36 transition whenever it happens it happens let me ask you one last question let’s say that your generation
0:51:42 everybody’s 27 now ends up living to on average 103 and that the quality of life is really good
0:51:50 which means that everybody gets you know another big big chapter of 20 or 30 or 40 years where they’re
0:51:58 able to pretty much do what they want i’m curious if you have ideas for other big chapters that you might
0:52:06 want to do would you want to become an opera singer a phd philosopher the president of some country etc etc
0:52:11 oh yeah i think what could be really cool if we all of a sudden added 20 more years to everybody’s
0:52:16 lives is like how much more education we could all consume you can keep on learning forever but it
0:52:21 becomes more difficult because your time becomes more constrained i would definitely take like 20 straight
0:52:27 years to learn everything i could about various industries and then apply them to various ideas i would have
0:52:37 i hope kyla gets her extra 20 years maybe more unfortunately she recently had to put down her
0:52:43 dog whose name was moo thanks to kyla for helping out with this episode she can be found on most
0:52:51 platforms at at kyla scan and her book is called in this economy and thanks to everyone else who shared
0:52:58 their insights on the elder swell i’d love to know what you thought of this episode and our whole cradle to
0:53:06 grave series our email is radio at freakonomics.com coming up next time on the show donald trump has my
0:53:12 colleagues in the senate afraid of him i think that we can beat fear you may have heard that cory
0:53:18 booker the senior u.s senator from new jersey recently took to the senate floor for a record 25 hours straight
0:53:26 to sound the alarm on trump but his concerns go deeper than that if the democratic party or leaders define
0:53:32 themselves only by what we’re against we will be lost as a nation we’ll talk about that and we’ll try
0:53:39 to keep up with the news in real time i’m just being told by my staff that an israel iran ceasefire
0:53:45 has been announced that’s next time on the show until then take care of yourself and if you can someone
0:53:52 else too freakonomics radio is produced by stitcher and renbud radio you can find our entire archive
0:53:59 on any podcast app also at freakonomics.com where we publish transcripts and show notes this episode
0:54:05 was produced by augusta chapman with help from alina culman it was mixed by eleanor osborne with help from
0:54:11 jeremy johnston the freakonomics radio network staff also includes dalvin abuaji ellen frankman elsa
0:54:16 hernandez gabriel roth greg rippon morgan levy jasmine clinger sarah lily tayo jacobs and zach
0:54:24 klipinski our theme song is mr fortune by the hitchhikers and our composer is luis guerra as always thanks for
0:54:25 listening
0:54:36 steve wright the american comedian says i want to live forever so far so good that’s kind of my approach
0:54:44 the freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything
0:54:48 stitcher

0:00:07 Have you ever found yourself agitated, or confounded, or just sick of the current state
0:00:11 of affairs, and wondered what it might be like to live in another time?
0:00:19 I do not belong to this time period. I know it sounds crazy, but when I wore armor, and
0:00:24 I’m sitting in front of a castle in Germany or in Poland, I felt like I belonged there.
0:00:25 You know, I feel at home.
0:00:29 For some people, home is in the Middle Ages.
0:00:37 It appears to be a simpler time. People worked hard and played hard. It seems exotic to us now.
0:00:44 The exotic place these people are in is New Jersey, at the Burlington County Fairgrounds.
0:00:51 It’s a warm, sticky Sunday in June, and they are attending the annual New Jersey Renaissance Fair.
0:00:58 Fair with an E at the end. Despite the heat, they’re wearing woolen vests and long-sleeved dresses,
0:01:06 heavy boots. Also, among the men, a lot of very bushy beards. Matt Schwarz is one of the musical
0:01:08 performers. He is a harpist.
0:01:13 I think nowadays, you look at a world that doesn’t have a lot of our modern problems, and you think it
0:01:18 was perfect. Of course, back then, they had their own problems. But I think there’s much to be said
0:01:22 with a world in which you’re in touch with the outdoors and nature.
0:01:26 Jordan Cavalier is another musical performer.
0:01:33 This is called the Nikolharpa. It’s a Swedish key fiddle. It’s 16 strings of medial Swedish glory.
0:01:37 It has three melody strings, one drone string, and 12 sympathetic strings.
0:01:53 In the U.S. alone, there are a couple hundred Renaissance fairs each year. They give you a
0:02:00 chance to hear period music, eat a turkey leg or a giant pickle, and pretend that you are not only in a
0:02:02 different time, but that you are a different person.
0:02:08 I am Sir Maligan, the Knight of Fortitude, part of the Knights of Virtue, soon to fight in the
0:02:10 Tournament of Virtue, here at 1.30 on the field.
0:02:23 Okay, so there’s two knights on, like, different horses on opposing sides. And they have, like, their
0:02:27 jousting stick, and they’re trying to get the rings. So whichever one gets the rings, they get the point.
0:02:39 Another knight, Paul Mahaffey, emerges from his jousting tournament, sweaty and winded.
0:02:48 It’s almost been a year since I armored up. And I love it. It was exhausting. But I could do it
0:02:54 again in 10 minutes. The adrenaline gets going. And you just get in there. It’s just you and him.
0:02:58 That’s all you see. Because you can’t see anything else in the helmet. And it’s great.
0:03:03 Okay, so that’s what they’re all doing here. What are we doing here?
0:03:09 When we set out to make a three-part series about the arc of human life, we knew we would
0:03:14 begin with birth and child rearing. That was last week’s episode. You can catch up later if you missed
0:03:19 it. We also knew that the final episode would be about aging and death. But what about the middle
0:03:24 episode? We thought it would be interesting to explore what it’s like to be middle-aged. But
0:03:30 then you realize that our current concept of middle-aged is very new. At the beginning of the 20th
0:03:37 century, average life expectancy was only 31 years old. Now, that number on its own is misleading.
0:03:41 There were plenty of old people and middle-aged people, too. But the average was brought down by
0:03:48 the incredibly high rate of child mortality. So we got to wondering, what was it like to be middle-aged
0:03:55 back in the Middle Ages? And we asked the Renaissance Fair attendees a simple question. If you could go
0:04:00 back, would you go back? I’d rather be middle-aged in pretty much any century under the Middle Ages.
0:04:02 That was rough. Rough time.
0:04:08 I would have not survived anything. No, I need, like, a Marriott, but I need, like, a JW Marriott.
0:04:10 I don’t even survive this when it rains.
0:04:17 So we have this thing today called ibuprofen that is a very, very powerful help to being middle-aged.
0:04:23 So that’s how the fairgoers feel. Today on Freakonomics Radio, we get an expert view
0:04:29 on what it was like to be middle-aged in the Middle Ages. Ibuprofen not included.
0:04:46 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything,
0:04:48 with your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:05:04 The Middle Ages, as agreed upon by most historians, cover the years from roughly 500 to 1500.
0:05:12 Most historians also agree that Renaissance fairs are not entirely accurate. So we decided
0:05:14 to speak with a couple of actual historians.
0:05:20 My name is Neslihan Shanojak, and I teach medieval history at Columbia University.
0:05:24 How would you describe generally your research interests?
0:05:28 My research interests are mostly in religious history of the Middle Ages,
0:05:35 specifically history of Christianity. But because religion is so pervasive in the medieval world,
0:05:40 basically every other type of history falls into the religious history that is social history,
0:05:45 political history, and everything. So I basically study everything.
0:05:48 How did you come to this particular concentration?
0:05:53 My story is a little bit unusual, really, because I actually graduated from college as an industrial
0:05:54 engineer.
0:05:57 Oh, sorry. Yeah, that’s a change.
0:06:03 That is a change. But then in the last year of engineering, I had read Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.
0:06:10 And there I met for the first time the Franciscan Order. What is special about Franciscan Order is that they
0:06:16 really wanted to be poor, very, very poor, poorer than everybody else. And I thought, who on earth might
0:06:23 like to be poor? It seemed to me so strange, such a great contrast to modern life when everybody wants
0:06:29 to be rich. I was very fascinated from the beginning with the monks and friars’ life. Now I see a lot of problems
0:06:31 in that kind of life that I didn’t see before.
0:06:32 For instance?
0:06:42 For instance, no matter how hard they try, their passions and moral issues do not leave them. We think that the monks
0:06:48 are calm and peaceful, dedicating their lives to God. But when you read the sources, it’s not like that.
0:06:50 They are very much acting.
0:06:52 They could be angry and horny.
0:06:55 Exactly. And corrupt and greedy.
0:07:03 Okay, so that’s Nestle Cheneczak, our first scholar of the Middle Ages. Let’s meet the other one.
0:07:08 My name is Philip Schofield. I’m a medieval historian at Aberystwyth.
0:07:10 That’s a university in Wales.
0:07:16 My main interests are in the broad area of economic history. And I work particularly on peasantry.
0:07:19 What would you say drew you to the study of peasantry?
0:07:25 As an undergraduate, I was really intrigued by the broad socioeconomic history that medievalists,
0:07:29 especially in France, were doing, looking at the social structure of medieval villages.
0:07:36 When I read about the work of archaeologists and others who find physical evidence or ruins,
0:07:41 it always seems a bit miraculous that things have survived from so long ago. And yet it does happen.
0:07:49 When you study economic history, I’m curious what the evidence is like and if it feels as though you’re
0:07:54 always reaching through a veil of sorts, never quite getting to the reality.
0:08:00 That’s always the sense on one level. When I was doing my doctorate, I wrote at one stage something
0:08:06 like, he probably thought that. And my supervisor, someone called Barbara Harvey, she said,
0:08:10 what are you doing? You don’t probably think it. You either know it or you don’t know it. And if you
0:08:15 don’t know it, leave it out. That’s sort of old school, but it appeals to me, really.
0:08:21 I imagine if I walk through a 14th century peasant village on the basis of my understanding from 14th
0:08:26 century records, there’s undoubtedly a lot of things that would surprise me. But there are local court
0:08:34 records, manorial records that are really the records generated by lords, but include a huge amount of
0:08:41 incidental information directed at the peasantry, including, for example, litigation. That’s something
0:08:45 I work on quite a bit, is actually peasants not litigating with their lords, but peasants litigating
0:08:46 with each other.
0:08:55 I asked Philip Schofield if he was willing to imagine the daily life of a middle-aged peasant from that
0:09:01 era, maybe a composite figure based on bits and pieces of Schofield’s research. He was actually able
0:09:03 to do us one better than that.
0:09:09 I did write something almost 30 years ago now in a journal called Past and Present about two peasants who
0:09:16 litigated. So they’re both real people. And because they were extremely enthusiastic litigants,
0:09:21 they tended to be more evident. And because they’re relatively wealthy, they were also more evident,
0:09:26 and they also exist in taxation data. So that’s the kind of person I would maybe go to.
0:09:32 Excellent. Of these two peasant litigants, I need you to pick one that you can describe for us. Who
0:09:33 would you prefer?
0:09:36 I will pick someone called Robert, the son of Adam.
0:09:39 Okay. Robert, the son of Adam. Where does he live?
0:09:42 He lived in a place called Hinder Clay in Suffolk.
0:09:46 And what year would you like to place Robert, the son of Adam, in Hinder Clay that would count
0:09:48 as his middle age?
0:09:52 Let’s say about 1305. I hope he’s not dead by then.
0:09:58 He was certainly active around that time and was doing pretty well.
0:09:59 How old is he?
0:10:02 I would say he was probably in his 30s.
0:10:04 And that counts as middle-aged then?
0:10:11 I think so. Yeah. I was thinking about this today and what I know about calculations of life expectancy.
0:10:19 Most of that is really hard to do from the records I’m describing, but it’s really monastic evidence from the 15th century where you’ve got a whole range of
0:10:32 moments and then you can follow them through various administrative tasks and then often they end up in the infirmary and their deaths are recorded.
0:10:38 The estimates for that tend to suggest that life expectancy is taking people into their late 40s, 50.
0:10:48 Okay, we will return later to Robert, son of Adam, a relatively wealthy peasant in Hinder Clay, England.
0:10:55 I asked Nesli Şenerzak, who grew up in Turkey, what it’s like to really immerse yourself in medieval history.
0:11:03 It gives you perspective, it gives you an alternative, it takes you out of the bubble, which is modern life.
0:11:06 When we grow up, we are born into this life.
0:11:12 We sometimes think that this is the only way things could be, but it could have been another way.
0:11:20 So if I asked you to switch places with someone from that period, would you be willing or interested?
0:11:23 If I’m going to have my kids with me, yes.
0:11:28 If certain conditions are met, I guess I would, yeah, because it’s a much simpler life.
0:11:30 I’d like to be an artisan in a city, I guess.
0:11:32 What would you make?
0:11:34 Stained glass would be nice.
0:11:36 I mean, stained glass is so beautiful.
0:11:42 People in the Middle Ages had their shops actually inside their homes, so I don’t have to even go somewhere else.
0:11:45 Where exactly would you choose to live?
0:11:47 Let’s make it Italy.
0:11:48 In a city or rural?
0:11:51 It has to be a city, really.
0:11:56 Italian cities were much more advanced in the 13th century, much better organized.
0:11:58 You have free health care, free education.
0:12:01 If I’m rural, then I would have to be a peasant.
0:12:02 And you want to be an artisan?
0:12:04 Yes, I’d rather be an artisan.
0:12:08 I think being a peasant requires far too much energy, which I don’t think I have.
0:12:10 Let’s start with the city.
0:12:10 Where will you live?
0:12:13 Well, I quite like Florence, so it would have to be Florence.
0:12:15 What year shall we pick?
0:12:17 1250s would be good.
0:12:21 In real life today, do you have a spouse or a partner?
0:12:23 I do have a spouse, yes.
0:12:24 And he’s Italian, actually.
0:12:33 So, Nestle Shenezak has raised the stakes by including herself in our exercise, and she’s bringing
0:12:35 along her husband and two sons.
0:12:40 I asked Philip Schofield what we know about the family of Robert, the son of Adam.
0:12:41 He’s got a brother.
0:12:44 Beyond that, it’s difficult to be entirely sure.
0:12:52 We do know from other contemporaries that if he was fairly typical, he would have a wife
0:12:58 and maybe a small number of surviving children, some of whom would survive into adulthood.
0:13:06 So, it’s quite reasonable to suppose that he had three or four children who moved beyond infancy.
0:13:08 What do his children do?
0:13:10 At what age do they start to perhaps work with him?
0:13:14 Well, they were still really young, you know, less than 10.
0:13:20 So, small-scale herding, managing crops, keeping birds off things, helping with harvest and so on.
0:13:23 What level of education would these kids be getting?
0:13:26 Education is fairly limited.
0:13:31 A lot of education is the education of the village, in a sense, of learning from doing, in some ways.
0:13:35 What does Robert eat and drink?
0:13:44 The bulk of his diet would have been predominantly grain-based, but leavened by fish, both sea fish
0:13:46 and freshwater fish.
0:13:50 Maybe a little bit of meat, probably bacon, but also poultry.
0:13:53 Quite a lot of ale in his diet.
0:13:59 Is there a relatively low-alcohol version of ale that children and others would drink since it was safer than water?
0:14:01 I mean, children are drinking ale, definitely.
0:14:05 Whether it’s low-alcohol or not, it’s difficult to be entirely sure.
0:14:10 Obviously, in Florence, you would have access to very good wine.
0:14:13 What would a family dinner look like?
0:14:17 It would definitely have vegetables and fruit.
0:14:22 Meat is a little bit more problematic for medieval people because it’s expensive.
0:14:26 Pork and chicken would be cheaper than beef.
0:14:29 So we might have that maybe once a week.
0:14:35 People did consume a lot of beans and lentils and things like that also because they were durable.
0:14:37 They don’t go bad.
0:14:41 We wouldn’t obviously have any fridge or anything, not even a cellar.
0:14:45 But also, of course, the main staple of any diet is the bread.
0:14:51 Say a bit more about why you were determined to put yourself in a city and not a village or the countryside.
0:14:55 The big difference is that you are much less exposed to the elements.
0:15:01 City life is pretty safe compared to the rural life because the cities are walled.
0:15:03 They are very well protected.
0:15:05 In the countryside, you do get raids.
0:15:12 You might have animals coming in, wild animals, which were much more in number in the Middle Ages than they are now.
0:15:14 Obviously, they’ve been hunted down over the years.
0:15:18 There is food insecurity in the countryside.
0:15:24 I wouldn’t have food insecurity because generally what the medieval cities like Florence did, they had big granaries.
0:15:30 They stored grain just in case there’s famine, and then they would distribute it to the citizens.
0:15:33 Let’s talk about the state of commerce.
0:15:34 How does that work?
0:15:37 How much do you make, and what are you able to buy with it?
0:15:42 I would have to find commissioned jobs if I’m a stained glass maker.
0:15:46 That would mean either a church or a monastery would have to give me orders.
0:15:50 There are lots of churches, many more than now.
0:16:01 And if a church can afford having stained glass, which would be expensive, I think I can make a decent amount of money to be what corresponds today to middle class.
0:16:07 Okay, so you’re a middle class, middle-aged artisan in the Middle Ages.
0:16:10 Yes, that’s a lot of middle.
0:16:12 That’s okay.
0:16:12 That’s why we’re here.
0:16:15 What is it like to be a freelance artisan then?
0:16:20 Well, the thing is, I would have to enter the guild of stained glass makers.
0:16:23 All the trades were very well organized.
0:16:26 Today’s trade unions, they really have their origins in the Middle Ages.
0:16:29 So I would have to pay dues to my guild.
0:16:33 I would have to be registered as a master of stained glass.
0:16:38 And the amount of money I can charge would be regulated by them.
0:16:47 When you read economic history, the economists are usually anti-guild because they see guilds as monopolistic within their domain.
0:17:00 There was actually this famous economic essay about how the Candlemakers Guild were trying to have a resolution passed that forbade the sun from shining at certain times.
0:17:03 Because with too much sunlight, there was less demand for their products.
0:17:05 Plainly, that was not quite real.
0:17:08 But the sentiment, I think, was legitimate.
0:17:11 I’m curious, how would you feel about your guild?
0:17:15 Would you feel it’s generally a positive for you and for the rest of society?
0:17:17 Positive for you and a negative for the others?
0:17:19 And maybe even negative for you?
0:17:27 Because you have to join this guild and pay dues and have your wages probably set as opposed to being a true freelancer.
0:17:34 Well, I’m not inflicted with the laissez-faire ideas of the modern economy, which I consider a good thing.
0:17:37 The guild is a very good thing for the people inside it.
0:17:42 It’s a very bad, negative thing for the people who are outside because then you cannot find a job.
0:17:49 That is, if a freelance stained glass maker comes to Florence, they would not be legally able to work.
0:17:52 But the guild has so many benefits.
0:17:53 Yes, I do pay dues.
0:18:00 But for example, if I ever fall into hardship, if I get sick, they come and help me.
0:18:01 There are even religious benefits.
0:18:08 All the guild members are expected to pray for one another at the time of sickness and especially after death.
0:18:11 Would you have an appetite for expanding your business?
0:18:19 Maybe renting a bigger workshop and hiring people and becoming a big-time commercial person yourself?
0:18:22 Whether I’m some kind of a proto-capitalist?
0:18:25 No, I can’t imagine that.
0:18:29 I chose the medieval life because it is the simpler one.
0:18:34 The more people get into your life, the more difficult your life becomes.
0:18:36 I’d rather try to have a small life.
0:18:38 I don’t have to deal with too many people.
0:18:39 The customers are enough.
0:18:41 I’m my kids and the partner.
0:18:50 OK, and how about the economic life of Robert, son of Adam, our peasant friend in Hinder Clay, England?
0:18:55 A peasant in this period could be relatively wealthy.
0:19:00 I mean, not as wealthy as an aristocrat or a major landowner.
0:19:03 But within their community, they can be wealthier than others.
0:19:11 And for Hinder Clay and Robert, son of Adam, we have very good taxation data, which places him at or near the top of his own community.
0:19:16 How exactly does Robert make his living and how exactly does Robert make his living and how has he done so well?
0:19:18 That’s an interesting one.
0:19:25 A lot of his activity is to do with production of grain and farming his land, almost certainly with some livestock as well.
0:19:42 What’s interesting about Robert from taxation records is he has a much higher proportion of a single grain than almost anybody else in his community, which suggests he’s probably not involved in some monoculture, but he’s probably buying and selling and accumulating as a grain factor.
0:19:46 Oh, I see. So he raises a crop, but he’s also a merchant.
0:19:47 I think so.
0:19:49 I see. And what is his grain?
0:20:01 In this particular part of the country, barley is a predominant crop. People also produce wheat, oats, rye, peas, beans, you know, but the predominant crop is barley and that’s where a lot of his wealth is held.
0:20:15 And what would you say are the characteristics of Robert that enabled him to become not just a farmer, but a merchant? Is he particularly clever? Is he a bit of a bully? Do you think he’s honest?
0:20:28 My sense is he is clever. My sense is that he’s actually, I often use the term aggressively acquisitive. I think he’s someone who knows how to maximize opportunity. Some people have that ability, don’t they? And some people don’t.
0:20:39 His brother, William, the son of Adam, is also quite well-to-do in the village, but in a more traditional way. And I think that maybe they’re born into a family that’s relatively well-to-do, though we don’t have the records that allow us to see that.
0:20:51 So he probably is relatively well-off in capital terms to begin with, but also knows how to play that, how to use markets, how to advantage himself, and in particular how to use law to support that.
0:21:00 When things start to go against him in any way, he’s very quick to turn to law, very quick to actually bring people into court, to sue them, to not give up.
0:21:05 I don’t know whether he’s a bully, but I do think he knows what he wants and is prepared to push hard to get it.
0:21:08 How much land does he have?
0:21:16 He has something in the region of 20 acres of land, so he may be investing in a nice house, a reasonably nice house.
0:21:23 It would be probably a single level, possibly with a slightly raised area above it.
0:21:31 There might be a distinction between living quarters for people and perhaps a space to the other side of it where livestock might be kept.
0:21:32 Are there windows in this house?
0:21:36 In this house, probably more shutters, certainly not glass windows.
0:21:39 And what are the building materials, outside and inside?
0:21:50 You might be talking about a kind of wattle and daubing, a combination of mud plaster mixed in with straw and things like horsehair and a wooden frame, which you attach that to.
0:21:53 A fairly basic stone flooring as well.
0:21:55 What’s the furniture look like?
0:21:58 Wooden furniture, locally made wooden furniture.
0:22:00 Some of it might be quite ornate.
0:22:05 He might copy his lord in the way in which he arranges that living space.
0:22:13 So he might seat himself at the end of a table with his family in relative seniority, closer or further away from him, for example.
0:22:16 He might invest in some decent tableware.
0:22:17 Silver?
0:22:19 Possibly not, but good pottery.
0:22:22 How many channels does he get on his television?
0:22:25 I’m guessing fewer than five.
0:22:26 Not so many.
0:22:27 Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably.
0:22:32 So this lord you mentioned, tell me about him.
0:22:34 Robert is a vilain or a serf.
0:22:36 So he’s an unfree peasant.
0:22:39 So he technically belongs to his lord.
0:22:41 You kind of buried the lead on me there.
0:22:42 That’s a big deal, isn’t it?
0:22:43 Yeah, yeah.
0:22:47 But at the same time, he’s in a community that is both free and unfree.
0:22:50 So around him, there might be free peasants and he’s an unfreed peasant.
0:22:54 But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s significantly disadvantaged.
0:23:00 The relationship between freedom and unfree in the medieval village could be almost reversed.
0:23:14 Some of the people who hold free land might be relatively poor people holding relatively small plots, whereas the unfree might be relatively privileged individuals, except that they obviously have restrictions on their mobility and so on and so forth.
0:23:23 So if Robert is essentially owned or circumscribed by his lord, what are some of the upsides and downsides of that?
0:23:27 There are some people who say, well, villainage is actually not an impediment.
0:23:28 It’s a safety net.
0:23:32 Because the lord cares about his vilains, they are his bread and butter in a sense.
0:23:33 He protects them.
0:23:35 He doesn’t want to be overly demanding of them.
0:23:39 But customary rents they pay are fairly low and fixed.
0:23:42 Others would say that villainage is an imposition.
0:23:44 It’s a restriction of basic freedoms.
0:23:48 It means that if you want to marry off your daughter, you have to pay a fine.
0:23:50 If you want to leave as a young man, you have to pay a fine.
0:23:55 Anything you do effectively is through the permission of the lord.
0:23:56 Who is Robert’s lord?
0:23:58 His lord is the monastery.
0:24:02 It’s the monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, which is a long-established Benedictine monastery.
0:24:11 Very traditional, relatively hard-hearted, I would say, and clearly gains the antagonism of local people.
0:24:18 This brings us to an interesting and important point, the power of the church in the Middle Ages.
0:24:20 We will get into that after the break.
0:24:24 Also, how the criminal justice system worked.
0:24:28 They would go around and ask people what gossip they have heard.
0:24:29 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:24:30 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:24:31 We’ll be right back.
0:24:47 We’ve been speaking with two middle-aged scholars of the Middle Ages about what it would be like to have been middle-aged in the Middle Ages.
0:24:58 Philip Schofield was describing a fairly prosperous English peasant named Robert, the son of Adam, who was in a sort of captive business relationship with a local monastery.
0:25:00 This is early 14th century.
0:25:13 Meanwhile, in 13th century Florence, Nestle Schenozak, a historian at Columbia, has imagined herself living with her actual family from today, and she is making stained glass for living.
0:25:20 This means that she, like Robert, the son of Adam, was in a financial relationship with the church.
0:25:25 And let’s remember, the Middle Ages were a very churchy time.
0:25:26 Here is Schenozak.
0:25:29 In the Middle Ages, there is not even a word for religion, really.
0:25:30 It’s a modern word.
0:25:32 People have this faith.
0:25:40 In many ways, it determines everything they do, how they rule people, how they work, how they talk to each other, how they write.
0:25:45 Do you think that you, living back then, would be relatively devout?
0:25:47 Relatively, not too much.
0:25:52 How central and in what ways was religion central to your family?
0:26:00 It would be central in the sense that my two boys would have to be baptized, and they would be baptized in the cathedral of the city.
0:26:03 Because when you live in a city, that’s where they get the baptism.
0:26:06 We would regularly go to the church.
0:26:13 And as much as I can find time from my work, I would also try to go to the morning and evening prayers during the weekdays.
0:26:20 What is your relationship to the church, capital C church, not the actual parish?
0:26:25 How do you think about the church or God or the saints in relation to your life?
0:26:35 So because I live in a city, I would have actually much more access to the capital C church than someone living in the countryside because their experience would only be the parish.
0:26:38 But I can see the cathedral, I can see the bishop.
0:26:45 I think I would feel, as many people did feel then, a little bit angry and upset that they are just far too rich.
0:26:52 The bishop has got gold-plated robes and everything, and the cathedral is so big.
0:26:54 They eat really well.
0:27:00 There might be some resentment about that, that that doesn’t reflect the poor Christ.
0:27:10 When you think about yourself as this artisan with your family, and let’s say you felt some of that resentment, follow that thought through a bit further for me.
0:27:14 When you think about where that wealth comes from, what do you think then?
0:27:19 The wealth of the church really comes from the donations and the wills.
0:27:21 That’s how it built up over the centuries.
0:27:24 It’s the people that made the institutional church rich.
0:27:32 But there is also the fact that the church, after the 9th century, started to collect tithes, which were taxes.
0:27:37 So one tenth of my income has to go to my parish, which is quite a lot.
0:27:39 More than the guild fees, probably, yes?
0:27:41 Yes, I would think so.
0:27:43 And how would you feel about that tithing?
0:27:44 I don’t know.
0:27:51 I think I would force myself to think about it as a good religious deed, that at least I’m giving it to the church.
0:27:55 And one-fourth of those tithes are supposed to go to the poor.
0:27:58 The church is supposed to sustain the poor.
0:28:02 So I would hope that the money I’m giving is really going into the good hands.
0:28:10 Now, let’s say your husband comes home from work one day and says, wow, you would not believe how beautiful the new wing of the monastery is.
0:28:14 It looks like it was built for, you know, an Egyptian pharaoh.
0:28:16 I wouldn’t feel good about that.
0:28:17 They are monks.
0:28:18 They’re supposed to imitate Christ.
0:28:21 They’re supposed to leave poor, as poor as they can.
0:28:26 I mean, they don’t have to die out of hunger, but they don’t need a luxurious new wing.
0:28:28 And that money could have gone to the poor.
0:28:29 Now, I want to be fair.
0:28:30 I just made that up.
0:28:33 What were the monasteries like in Florence at that period?
0:28:39 Well, you know, they were quite grandiose, if I may say.
0:28:47 I went back to Philip Schofield, who teaches at a Welsh university whose name I have a hard time pronouncing.
0:28:48 So here’s him saying it.
0:28:50 Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth.
0:28:56 And I asked if his 14th century peasant friend, Robert, son of Adam, was a regular churchgoer.
0:28:57 Almost certainly.
0:29:01 This is an orthodox Catholic country at this stage.
0:29:08 The room for stepping outside of perceived appropriate religious practices is relatively minimal.
0:29:12 There’s a big debate about what attendance meant relative to belief.
0:29:19 But certainly people do attend and would expect to attend in a fairly regular way.
0:29:22 Also, at different points in your life, may be going on pilgrimage.
0:29:24 Where would a pilgrimage be to?
0:29:26 Some people go to Jerusalem.
0:29:28 Some people might go somewhere in Western Europe.
0:29:31 But also, they may attend pilgrimage within England.
0:29:36 What does Robert think about God, or how does he conceive God?
0:29:42 Given that Christian teaching is to be charitable, and to love thy neighbor as thyself, and so on,
0:29:45 I can imagine people paying lip service to that.
0:29:50 But certainly from a lot of contemporary commentary, and I think probably Robert would fall into that
0:29:55 from my reading of him, people struggle to actually follow it through in their daily lives.
0:30:01 Would he have believed in curses, and was he perhaps on either the receiving or giving end of a curse?
0:30:07 Really hard to know that from this period, because it’s not showing up in quite the same way in our records.
0:30:11 Certainly people talk nastily about each other.
0:30:18 The gossip and hearsay was so much bigger source of information in the Middle Ages than it is now.
0:30:23 You would rely a lot on what other neighbors tell you.
0:30:25 And they did it without social media, even.
0:30:29 Exactly. That was the social media, basically, gossip and hearsay.
0:30:32 That was also the basis of the criminal justice system, by the way.
0:30:33 What do you mean?
0:30:35 That’s how they found the suspects.
0:30:39 They would go around and ask people what gossip they have heard,
0:30:42 if a crime has been committed and no one knows who committed it.
0:30:46 But then at a certain point, you tried to gather some actual evidence, yes?
0:30:49 That would be really difficult without forensic science.
0:30:55 If you think about the way the modern criminal justice system works, if there are no witnesses to a crime,
0:31:00 what are your fallbacks? Fingerprints and DNA analysis, none of that existed.
0:31:03 So what do you think the false conviction rate was?
0:31:11 In a place like Rome or Perugia, which are neighboring places to Florence, the conviction rate was so low,
0:31:15 only 10% of trials resulted in a conviction.
0:31:20 90% would be let go out of the reason that there is not enough evidence to convict them.
0:31:27 Because the judges had it on their conscience if they wrongfully sent somebody to execution.
0:31:31 So they would have to let them go if there is not enough evidence.
0:31:38 Was the legal system informed by religious feeling or religious devotion?
0:31:40 Oh, yes, absolutely.
0:31:46 Judges and the juries would always take a note that they are going to follow the procedure,
0:31:47 they are going to tell the truth.
0:31:52 Somehow people really have taken that quite seriously, especially the judges.
0:31:56 You can see that they are cringing not to give in.
0:31:57 They don’t want to execute people.
0:32:01 They are very afraid that in the other life God will see them as a murderer
0:32:04 if they do that without sufficient evidence.
0:32:09 And then do they conversely assume that if someone did commit a crime but there is no evidence
0:32:11 and the judge doesn’t want to convict,
0:32:15 do they assume that that criminal will be punished anyway by God?
0:32:21 It’s not that they think that God will punish them anyway, so let us not punish them.
0:32:25 That is not the case because they definitely did understand that if you do not
0:32:28 hold people accountable, then crime will increase.
0:32:30 You do need to deter people.
0:32:34 How was that balance struck with such a low conviction rate?
0:32:40 This low conviction rate belongs to the period where the trial started by an accusation.
0:32:45 There are two types of trials, the ones that start basically because I go and say to the
0:32:50 judge, my neighbor stole from me, and that would start a trial against my neighbor.
0:32:54 I would denounce my neighbor myself, but then I would have to prove the guilt.
0:32:55 I see.
0:32:56 And the other way?
0:33:02 After 1250s, you get a new trial, which is the basis of the modern trial we have,
0:33:03 inquisition trials.
0:33:05 The state starts the trial.
0:33:11 The state makes a case against the person based on the public rumors, based on gossip.
0:33:15 And then the conviction rate goes higher.
0:33:20 People resented that, especially in England, the start of the inquisition trial, they said
0:33:24 state has no business interfering into people’s conflicts.
0:33:28 It has been seen as an infringement into the rights of the people.
0:33:31 You mentioned this change came around 1250.
0:33:35 There must have been a period where both systems were operating at the same time, yes?
0:33:36 Exactly.
0:33:37 Very good.
0:33:42 In fact, if you go to the judiciaries, which still hold the ancient medieval records, there
0:33:46 are two books there, the Book of Accusations and Book of Inquisitions.
0:33:49 How long did the accusations last?
0:33:50 When did that die out?
0:33:56 Well, that’s a very good question, and frankly, I do not know the answer, but it went on for
0:33:57 a very long time.
0:34:02 It was considered a right of the people to accuse someone who committed a crime against
0:34:02 them.
0:34:07 Coming up after the break, let’s talk about dying in the Middle Ages.
0:34:12 The people we spoke with at the Renaissance Fair in New Jersey had some things to say about
0:34:12 that.
0:34:14 I don’t think I would have survived a lot.
0:34:16 I’m clumsy, I’m weak.
0:34:21 I probably would have broke my back pulling a plow or been trampled down by a Viking invader.
0:34:23 I would have not survived anything.
0:34:29 I would like to think I would have survived the bubonic plague, but when the hand of the
0:34:35 reaper comes a-sweeping across Europe and wipes out a sizable percentage of the population,
0:34:36 it doesn’t matter what you’re doing.
0:34:37 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:34:39 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:34:40 We’ll be right back.
0:34:53 Okay, let’s talk about death and dying during the Middle Ages.
0:34:59 As we all know, the definitive historical account comes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
0:35:01 Bring out your date!
0:35:06 Bring out your date!
0:35:06 There’s one.
0:35:08 Nine points.
0:35:09 I’m not dead!
0:35:09 What?
0:35:10 Nothing.
0:35:10 I don’t use your nine points.
0:35:12 I’m not dead!
0:35:12 Yeah.
0:35:14 He says he’s not dead?
0:35:14 Yes, he is.
0:35:15 I’m not!
0:35:16 He isn’t?
0:35:17 Well, he will be soon.
0:35:17 He’s very ill.
0:35:18 I’m getting better!
0:35:19 No, you’re not.
0:35:20 You’ll be stone dead in a moment.
0:35:21 I can’t take him like that.
0:35:23 It’s against regulations.
0:35:26 And here is an actual historian, Philip Schofield.
0:35:29 Undoubtedly, death was there.
0:35:30 I mean, death is always there.
0:35:31 Even today, apparently.
0:35:32 Yeah, apparently.
0:35:38 So I’ve heard in the second decade of the 14th century, there is a period known as the Great
0:35:42 Famine, where maybe 10% to 15% of the population died.
0:35:48 We can’t really see the total impact of that because the most vulnerable are the least visible.
0:35:55 We tend to think of peasant households as being complex and full of generations, but in reality,
0:35:58 they probably weren’t, mostly because people didn’t live long enough, really, for that to
0:35:58 happen.
0:36:02 Something we don’t know a lot about for this period, but we know about for later periods,
0:36:03 is infant mortality.
0:36:07 If you had a number of children, then the strong likelihood is you would also have a
0:36:10 considerable degree of loss in your life because of that.
0:36:13 Violent death is also reasonably prevalent.
0:36:16 And what about medicine in 14th century England?
0:36:20 What happens when Robert, the son of Adam, or someone in his family is sick?
0:36:25 They have a monastic community that’s their lord, so they may seek support from their community.
0:36:27 There will be an infirmary there.
0:36:33 There are things called hospitals, but they tend to be relatively low scale, unlike in
0:36:37 Tuscany, for example, where in this period there are substantial hospitals.
0:36:42 Here they are intended to house and support a symbolic number of poor, often the equivalent
0:36:44 to the number of the apostles, for example.
0:36:50 But you would have people that would travel around offering a range of skills, including
0:36:52 some limited medical skill.
0:36:57 So people who are barber surgeons, who might help set an arm or do something like that.
0:37:04 Nesli Shenezak, you will remember, located herself and her family in Florence.
0:37:07 This is starting to look like a wise choice.
0:37:09 There were public hospitals in Florence.
0:37:15 So if you are really sick and you need to be taken care of, then you can go there.
0:37:20 And anybody who volunteers there, they would take care of you for free.
0:37:28 Still, the healthcare is obviously, compared to the modern knowledge that we have, is much
0:37:28 more limited.
0:37:32 They just do not know what are the causes of the many diseases.
0:37:35 Antibiotics will go a long way to treat bubonic plague.
0:37:37 But in the Middle Ages, obviously, that was not available.
0:37:47 Across Western Europe, between 1347 and 1350, possibly 45% of the population died.
0:37:52 What’s remarkable is how society coped with that.
0:37:59 I don’t know how modern society would cope with 45% mortality, but there is enormous continuity.
0:38:03 There’s a lot of contemporary comment and shock and fearfulness.
0:38:10 But also, the local records I was talking about record, for instance, repeatedly, X has died,
0:38:12 Y has died, Z has died, and so on.
0:38:18 You get that persistence of normality in the face of something that was utterly abnormal.
0:38:24 Nestle, how about you, living in 13th century Florence with your husband and two sons, how do you think about death?
0:38:26 Yes, that’s the big question.
0:38:30 I would worry about it, what will happen to me when I die.
0:38:33 And if I’m a devout Christian, definitely I would believe in afterlife.
0:38:43 So, I would try to prepare myself and not leave it to old age, because that’s actually what a lot of people have done, even in the Middle Ages.
0:38:47 They lived their youth rather frivolously.
0:38:49 How old would you expect to live until?
0:38:57 Oh, that depends on so many conditions, but I would hope that I can live until maybe 55, 60.
0:38:59 How old are you now in real life?
0:39:00 52.
0:39:03 I didn’t realize I was speaking with you so close to the end of your life.
0:39:04 Well, yeah.
0:39:05 I’m going to miss you.
0:39:11 Well, there will be somebody else in my place doing the stained glass.
0:39:13 No, no, no, I don’t mean your stained glass.
0:39:16 I mean, I’ve taken a liking to you during this conversation.
0:39:21 When you said 52, I imagined you living easily till 70 or 75.
0:39:27 No, I don’t think that very often happened to ordinary medieval citizens.
0:39:35 I asked Philip Schofield if he would have liked to live during the period he studies.
0:39:37 I think for a short period of time, I’d be interested.
0:39:43 One of the things that would be shocking would be the level of casual cruelty.
0:39:50 These villages where people are living fairly close to a marginal existence can be harsh places.
0:39:59 A woman cropped up in litigation that I was looking at recently who had been told to return eight hens that she’d purchased from somebody.
0:40:07 And he then said, well, she’s defamed me because she did return the eight hens, but she’d stitched their heads together.
0:40:13 I think that hints at a kind of culture that we might find difficult to immediately just settle into.
0:40:19 If you did have that opportunity, I mean, we’re just talking about time travel here now, which is a constant fascination for so many of us.
0:40:30 What are maybe one or two of the most unanswered or perhaps unanswerable questions about that life that you as an economic historian would really love to crack?
0:40:35 What I’ve mentioned earlier would be the proportion of the truly vulnerable.
0:40:38 What does that society look like if you walk down a street?
0:40:44 Do you see in a village people that are mostly doing fine and supporting each other?
0:40:49 Or do you see desperation alongside relative prosperity?
0:40:53 So it’s not a particularly pleasant angle, but I think it’s an important one.
0:40:58 The degree of social inequality is something that our sources don’t really give us full insight into.
0:41:08 And would your main motivation for understanding that be gratitude from a modern perspective or simply empirical verification?
0:41:16 It would mostly be empirical in a sense that I’d really want to know what are the hidden stories in our history that we’re not picking up.
0:41:26 That has its own salutary lessons, of course, for our contemporary society about how we think of ourselves and what we miss in our society and how we ignore those that perhaps are not as advantaged as others.
0:41:28 You know, what are we missing?
0:41:38 There was someone called Theral Rogers writing in the 19th century who said what he wouldn’t give for a history of the medieval village when so much of our history is wasted on the froth of kings and queens.
0:41:42 And I went back to Neslihan Shenezhak too.
0:41:51 At the beginning of this conversation, you said you think you would prefer to live then as long as you could take your family with you.
0:42:05 Now that we’ve talked about all these different elements, the economics and the legal system and religiosity and food, etc., etc., I’m curious how you’re feeling about your choice.
0:42:12 You’d prefer to be there then, even though, according to you, you’d only have a few more years of life left?
0:42:16 And it sounds like you’re going to spend a lot of that life in church, repenting and so on.
0:42:19 Or would you rather stay with us here?
0:42:24 Well, that’s a difficult question because, you know, I have a really nice life here too.
0:42:28 But for one thing, I don’t see the point of trying to live longer and longer.
0:42:31 It’s the same thing, just more.
0:42:33 It depends on how I live the life.
0:42:36 That might be naive of me.
0:42:38 The stress was much less in the Middle Ages.
0:42:41 Now we have to deal with a million things.
0:42:45 The technology in so many ways has made our life hell.
0:42:52 The social media, the emails that you have to reply, electronic banking and taxes that you have to figure out.
0:42:56 Also, the fact that you don’t have electricity in many ways, you do get a very good rest.
0:42:59 You don’t keep working at night.
0:43:00 Will you take me with you?
0:43:02 If you’re ready, yes.
0:43:03 Do you think you can do it?
0:43:05 I don’t know.
0:43:08 At the beginning of this conversation, I never would have thought so, but you’re fairly persuasive.
0:43:10 Yeah, well, I have to be.
0:43:11 I teach this.
0:43:13 You know, I’m always looking for converts.
0:43:21 When we first had the idea for this episode to explore what it would be like to have been middle-aged in the Middle Ages,
0:43:25 I thought it might be a ridiculous pursuit.
0:43:28 But now that we’ve made the episode, I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all.
0:43:30 It’s something I love about history and historians.
0:43:36 They are so good at bringing you into their world that your mind starts racing with comparisons to your own time.
0:43:40 The benefits of the modern world are massive.
0:43:45 But as Nestle Schenerzak pointed out, there are also significant costs.
0:43:50 The more people get into your life, the more difficult your life becomes.
0:43:53 So I’d rather try to have a small life.
0:43:56 How do you think about our time versus that one?
0:43:58 Would you want to go back?
0:44:00 Under what circumstances?
0:44:01 Let us know.
0:44:05 Our email is radio at Freakonomics dot com.
0:44:08 Coming up next time on the show, consider this fact.
0:44:15 For the first time in history, there will soon be more older adults living in the U.S. than children.
0:44:20 One of the great achievements of the 20th century is to produce an aging society.
0:44:22 It’s so weird we see it so negative.
0:44:30 We talk to the scientists, economists, investors and historians trying to give this aging society a new kind of future.
0:44:32 That’s next time on the show.
0:44:34 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:44:36 And if you can, someone else, too.
0:44:39 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:44:43 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app.
0:44:47 Also at Freakonomics dot com, where we publish transcripts and show notes.
0:44:51 This episode was produced by Augusta Chapman with help from Zach Lipinski.
0:44:55 It was mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jeremy Johnston.
0:44:58 Thanks to Nick Nevis for field recording at the Renaissance Fair.
0:45:00 And he had help from Kim Kupal.
0:45:09 Thanks to everyone at the fair who spoke with us and also the musicians, including Michelle Mountain, Matt Schwarz, Jordan Cavalier and Vince Conaway.
0:45:20 The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Cullman, Dalvin Aboaji, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly and Tao Jacobs.
0:45:25 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhiker and our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:45:27 As always, thanks for listening.
0:45:31 Would I go back?
0:45:31 Would I go back?
0:45:32 I don’t know.
0:45:34 After watching Game of Thrones?
0:45:34 Probably not.

0:00:06 So, you got your Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.
0:00:13 I know that you and your husband have eight children, and you are a stepmom to six more
0:00:15 children from your husband’s first marriage.
0:00:19 I’m guessing there are not many other Harvard-educated economists who have 14 children?
0:00:20 I don’t know of any.
0:00:24 Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but I don’t know of any.
0:00:30 Catherine Pekalik is an economics professor at the Catholic University of America.
0:00:33 I asked about her main areas of research.
0:00:37 Education, schools, fertility, family formation.
0:00:45 And what would you say you bring to those topics that the median economists might not bring?
0:00:51 I think I bring to the table a large number of things that are outside of the field.
0:00:56 And, you know, of course, I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t add that we’ll have a lot of kids.
0:00:58 And so that makes you think about things a little bit differently.
0:01:04 You might say that a lot of people have started to think differently about fertility and family
0:01:04 formation.
0:01:13 For decades, the great fear among demographers and politicians and environmentalists was overpopulation.
0:01:19 They argued that the Earth’s resources simply couldn’t support three billion people, certainly
0:01:22 not five billion or eight billion, which is where we stand today.
0:01:29 That fear hasn’t totally gone away, but it has been joined by a fear of the opposite, that
0:01:32 there are now too few babies being born.
0:01:34 Here’s an astonishing fact.
0:01:39 The global fertility rate has fallen by more than half over the past 50 years.
0:01:40 Why?
0:01:47 The answer to that question is complicated, and any solution is even more so.
0:01:53 Today on Freakonomics Radio, we begin a three-part series about the great arc of human life.
0:01:59 The inspiration for this series was a famous painting by Gustav Klimt called Death and Life.
0:02:06 It shows a healthy newborn lying serenely on a bed of flowers among a group of adults, most
0:02:08 of them young women.
0:02:17 But there, off to the side, is Death, a grim reaper, smiling over this peaceful scene, knowing
0:02:19 that he will win out in the end.
0:02:21 That’s the thing.
0:02:23 Life is finite.
0:02:26 And life is precious.
0:02:30 Does our knowing that it’s finite make it even more precious?
0:02:36 That’s a deep question, one we probably won’t be able to answer during this series, but it
0:02:39 will surely be hovering over every minute.
0:02:42 Our three-part series, Cradle to Grave, starts now.
0:03:00 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with
0:03:02 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:03:16 Donald Trump has declared himself the fertilization president, and he wants Americans to have more
0:03:17 babies.
0:03:18 Why?
0:03:21 Let’s start with what’s called the total fertility rate.
0:03:25 That’s the expected number of births that a woman would have over her lifetime.
0:03:31 In the first half of the 19th century, the U.S. fertility rate was over six babies per
0:03:31 woman.
0:03:34 In the late 1950s, it was 3.7.
0:03:39 Today, it’s at 1.6 babies per woman, a record low.
0:03:44 That also puts us well below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1.
0:03:46 That’s the number needed to keep a population steady.
0:03:50 So the Trump administration has proposed a variety of policies.
0:03:58 A $5,000 baby bonus, federally funded fertility education programs, even a national medal of
0:04:01 motherhood for women who have six or more children.
0:04:05 Catherine Pakalik would certainly be eligible for that medal.
0:04:09 She had six of her eight biological children while she was in graduate school.
0:04:11 The oldest is now 25.
0:04:16 She has found that people make assumptions about women with a lot of children.
0:04:22 The first assumption, which is pretty common, is that it’s somehow a less than rational choice.
0:04:27 That you do this maybe for cult-like reasons, because somebody says that you should, or a
0:04:29 religious leader says that you should.
0:04:37 Especially as somebody whose professional life is devoted to introspection and clear thinking
0:04:41 and understanding, especially as an economist, the nature of rationality, that feels really
0:04:41 painful.
0:04:49 You fear that it may look to your colleagues as if the choice to have children is in some
0:04:53 way revealing a lack of seriousness about your work.
0:04:55 I want to be very clear.
0:04:57 Most of what I’m telling you is in my head.
0:05:03 I’m not accusing anybody of having been less than supportive or negative in any way.
0:05:08 But the concern is you think that your colleagues will think you’re not as capable.
0:05:14 We should say there are plenty of male economists who do manage to have a good number of children
0:05:16 while they’re building their careers.
0:05:17 Yeah.
0:05:21 If you’re raising the question of the difference between men and women having children in academia,
0:05:27 we know that getting married and having children, there isn’t the productivity penalty, and in
0:05:28 fact, maybe a little gain.
0:05:31 But for women, of course, time is a rival good, right?
0:05:38 When people say children are expensive, they’re not wrong, but they aren’t used to using the
0:05:38 language economists use.
0:05:42 They’re expensive in terms of opportunity cost or lifestyle cost.
0:05:48 If the only fun thing you could do 40 years ago on your weekends with the amount of income
0:05:52 you had relative to the purchasing power that you have is the only fun thing you could do
0:05:58 is stay home and watch TV and drink beer, well, maybe having a kid is not really a big problem
0:05:58 for you.
0:06:03 But if the thing you can do now is you could travel, for instance, way more accessible for
0:06:08 so many more people all around the world, well, that next kid is going to completely change.
0:06:18 40 years ago, fewer than 3% of U.S. citizens even owned a passport.
0:06:22 Today, it’s around 50%.
0:06:24 So, yes, a lot of things have changed.
0:06:26 A lot of opportunities have arisen.
0:06:33 As she was thinking about big picture fertility, Pakalik realized it would be useful to consider
0:06:39 not just those smaller families, but also outliers like herself, people who are still having a
0:06:39 lot of kids.
0:06:41 Do they believe different things?
0:06:43 Have they made different choices?
0:06:46 Do they have a different value structure?
0:06:47 What does that look like?
0:06:53 So, I began traveling around the country to speak with women in a variety of communities
0:06:59 who have larger-than-normal-sized families to find out why they’re doing this and what they
0:07:01 think it means for themselves and for their families.
0:07:07 Pakalik and her research team interviewed 55 women across the country, all of whom have
0:07:08 five or more children.
0:07:15 The research project became a book that Pakalik published in 2024 called Hannah’s Children,
0:07:18 The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Deerth.
0:07:24 The biblical Hannah is probably the single most known character in the world who represents
0:07:26 someone who really wanted a child.
0:07:32 Your book is a qualitative study, but it’s not a quantitative study.
0:07:39 Plainly, if we’re talking about big population statistical analysis, this is just a drop in the
0:07:39 bucket.
0:07:40 Why did you go that route?
0:07:47 We really do have a lot of great large population data about what’s happening with birth rates
0:07:47 in general.
0:07:50 What we’re missing are some of the nitty-gritty about the theory.
0:07:56 So that’s where you turn in social sciences to qualitative work when you’re trying to struggle
0:07:56 with the theory.
0:08:01 All the women she interviewed have college degrees and all are religious.
0:08:08 They don’t see wanting children as a choice of a plan or control in the way that I think
0:08:11 most people think about planning their families.
0:08:17 There’s a very specific content to wanting children, which has to do with cooperation with
0:08:18 God’s providence.
0:08:22 I think people who think you can’t have too many children are particularly interesting.
0:08:28 Children are this sort of substantive good, but they probably don’t obey the same laws of
0:08:32 economic preferences where most normal goods, you eventually get satisfied by them, or we
0:08:33 say diminishing returns.
0:08:41 One thing this makes me think of is really, I think, an often unobserved or maybe even unobservable
0:08:49 idea, which is what is the utility to the children who were born in a big family who wouldn’t have
0:08:52 been born if it was a smaller or average-sized family?
0:08:54 And in this regard, I point to myself.
0:08:55 I’m the youngest of eight.
0:08:57 I believe you were one of nine siblings.
0:08:58 Is that right?
0:08:59 Yes.
0:09:01 I’m the oldest of nine, so I would have made it.
0:09:02 I would have made it.
0:09:04 You would have made it, but I keep thinking…
0:09:05 But you would not have made it.
0:09:10 Yeah, if my family hadn’t decided for some rather strange set of reasons to have eight
0:09:17 children, I wouldn’t be around to complain about, you know, anything, much less a pine on
0:09:19 proper family size.
0:09:24 When I was having my children, it gave me some special pleasure to think about, you know, having
0:09:27 my fifth, I would think, okay, which of my siblings is my fifth?
0:09:28 And that’s my brother, Ed.
0:09:30 He’s such a good friend of mine, and Ed’s great.
0:09:34 So then when you think, like, are we done trying to have children?
0:09:37 And you think to yourself, well, maybe there would be a little bit of a loss in thinking
0:09:39 there isn’t going to be that last child.
0:09:45 One memory I have of the biblical Hannah is that, you know, this is back when prayer was
0:09:52 not common or normalized in the Jewish tradition, but that Hannah did pray very, very intensely
0:09:56 to God to be able to have a child, which she hadn’t been able to.
0:10:01 And that her prayer was so intense that people thought she was crazy.
0:10:11 And that strikes me as a perhaps unintentionally appropriate parallel between the biblical Hannah
0:10:18 and modern Hannahs who are considered, like, I mean, I didn’t plan to ask you this question
0:10:23 this directly because it sounds quite rude, but have people from your friend groups, professional
0:10:28 groups, your own extended family, et cetera, thought that you were a little bit crazy for
0:10:30 wanting so badly to have so many children?
0:10:32 Yeah, people just don’t know what to make of it.
0:10:35 The most polite version is something like, why?
0:10:37 You know, why would you do this?
0:10:40 Sometimes there’s less polite versions of it.
0:10:40 For instance?
0:10:42 Don’t you know how this happens?
0:10:43 Oh, my gosh.
0:10:44 Right.
0:10:49 People say these things when they see a group of little kids and they think, oh, no, they’re
0:10:51 not all yours.
0:10:55 Most of us who get asked these questions, you come up with something kind of funny.
0:10:59 But in fact, there’s not an easy way to answer, why would you do this?
0:11:02 But you feel this is your servitude, essentially, yes?
0:11:03 Mm-hmm.
0:11:07 Would you say to a stranger, I believe that God wants me to have a lot of children?
0:11:08 I might say it.
0:11:10 It would depend on the context of the conversation.
0:11:13 I might revert to, I think it’s great.
0:11:14 It’s a substantive good.
0:11:15 Having children is wonderful.
0:11:20 I sometimes say I enjoyed my first one so much I wanted another one and kept going.
0:11:27 Is it fair to call you an advocate of or a promoter of higher fertility in general?
0:11:33 I’m only an advocate insofar as I’m happy to talk about my own personal experience.
0:11:39 But I’m a really strong believer that the household is the correct locus of decision-making and that
0:11:44 only an individual household can correctly assess the costs and benefits to them.
0:11:52 I also think it’s the only locus that is workable in a non-tyrannical society or a free society,
0:11:52 will say.
0:12:01 When Catherine Pakalik says that only an individual household can assess the costs and benefits
0:12:06 of having children, I’m guessing most of us can appreciate that sentiment.
0:12:11 But I’m guessing we also appreciate that a steep drop in fertility across the society
0:12:13 does have consequences.
0:12:16 Matthias Dupke certainly does.
0:12:20 How many children we have and what we do with our families are in many ways the most
0:12:24 important decisions in our life, both at a personal level, but also for the economy.
0:12:29 Dupke is a German-born economist who teaches at the London School of Economics.
0:12:35 I’m trained originally as a macroeconomist, but in fact, most of my work touches on family
0:12:35 economics.
0:12:41 He also co-wrote a book called Love, Money, and Parenting, how economics explains the way
0:12:42 we raise our kids.
0:12:45 And he has three children, if you’re wondering.
0:12:52 Economists like Dupke and Pakalik didn’t used to do research on things like family formation,
0:12:54 but that changed with Gary Becker.
0:12:58 He was a more holistic thinker than most economists of his era.
0:13:05 Becker got his PhD in 1955, won a Nobel Prize in 1992, and died in 2014.
0:13:10 And he liked to blend in ideas from sociology and criminology.
0:13:16 When Matthias Dupke got his PhD at the University of Chicago, he studied under Gary Becker.
0:13:22 For Gary Becker, economics is just a way to think about how people make decisions, and you
0:13:24 can apply that method to everything.
0:13:28 Who you marry, how many children you have, how you educate your children, all of those are
0:13:31 decisions that can be analyzed with the tools of economics.
0:13:38 Why, as an economist, is fertility and family formation such an important topic?
0:13:42 If you think, for example, of economic growth, it depends on population growth.
0:13:45 How many people there are, of course, is relevant for economic prospects.
0:13:49 If an economy is shrinking in population, it will also shrink in economic output.
0:13:56 There’s also important decisions on education, on human capital, more widely, that are done inside
0:13:59 families, which matter a lot for how the economy does in the long term.
0:14:05 Economists have many phrases to describe many things that normal people don’t need.
0:14:07 You have a lot of jargon.
0:14:13 When I hear you talk about children, my mind goes to some of the categorizations that economists
0:14:19 use to describe things like normal goods, inferior goods, and luxury goods.
0:14:21 Where do children fall in there?
0:14:26 That was the first fundamental question in the economics of fertility, because the first
0:14:30 observation in the data that Gary Becker had to deal with when he started with his whole
0:14:35 enterprise was that it used to be the case that richer people have fewer children.
0:14:39 So there was large families among the poorer households, smaller families among the richer
0:14:39 households.
0:14:42 And that was true everywhere across countries.
0:14:45 Also, over time, as countries get richer, they have fewer children.
0:14:49 If you just think of children as consumption goods, which maybe you shouldn’t, but if you
0:14:53 wanted to do that, you would have to say that sounds like children are an inferior good.
0:14:57 It’s an example of the kind of goods that you want less of as you get richer.
0:15:00 With children, it’s not quite like that.
0:15:04 When you get richer, instead of having a child, you have a very fancy dog or something like that.
0:15:06 It’s not the mechanism that’s going on.
0:15:08 So something else has to be going on.
0:15:14 Gary Becker tried to explain this pattern, even though rich people otherwise have more
0:15:15 of everything.
0:15:20 And his idea was that having children involves both deciding how many to have and how much
0:15:24 to invest in them, something that he refers to as child quality.
0:15:27 Okay.
0:15:33 If you were starting to worry that Gary Becker wasn’t quite a real economist, you can stop
0:15:33 worrying.
0:15:39 Now that we’re talking about child quality and how much to invest in children, and there’s
0:15:42 plenty of evidence that Becker’s framework was correct.
0:15:48 High income countries like Japan and South Korea and Spain have fertility rates well below
0:15:49 the replacement level.
0:15:55 What has changed since Becker’s time is that many countries that are not wealthy, like Albania
0:15:59 and Nepal and El Salvador are also below the replacement level.
0:16:05 What was initially something done only by higher income parents is now done by almost everybody.
0:16:11 And so while the quality quality choice is still there, it’s perhaps not what’s driving most
0:16:12 of the variation that we’re seeing today.
0:16:13 Okay.
0:16:16 So what has been driving lower fertility rates?
0:16:23 One obvious answer, obvious at least to an economist, is the fact that millions upon millions of
0:16:25 women have been entering the workforce.
0:16:32 We had a model of a clear gender separation of labor a generation ago, where many women were
0:16:35 homemakers or would interrupt their careers for long periods.
0:16:40 We are in a different phase now, where young women and men have very similar aspirations.
0:16:42 Most mothers are working, fathers are working.
0:16:45 And that creates a tension that we haven’t fully resolved yet.
0:16:48 It’s difficult to have two jobs and three or four children.
0:16:50 So many people stop a bit earlier.
0:16:53 The other thing that has happened is how we raise our children has changed.
0:16:56 The nature of parenting is now quite different.
0:17:01 We see in all the high income countries that parents spend a lot more time on parenting than
0:17:02 they did a generation ago.
0:17:08 The effort required has gone up to some extent for cultural reasons, but mostly I would argue
0:17:13 for economic reasons, namely that parents perceive perhaps correctly that the stakes have risen
0:17:14 in raising their children.
0:17:17 This relates to what Gary Becker used to call child quality.
0:17:21 A more modern phrase is intensive parenting.
0:17:23 Intensity is a good word for it.
0:17:24 How do you think about that as an economist?
0:17:26 Is that just what you’d call a personal preference?
0:17:29 I think it’s not a personal preference at all.
0:17:32 This is something that I’ve worked on a lot with my co-author, Fabrizio Zilibari.
0:17:38 What we argue is that parents are really responding to a changed environment, just like we respond
0:17:40 as consumers to changes in incentives.
0:17:44 A big part of that is rising inequality and rising stakes in education.
0:17:51 Why do American parents care so much about making sure their kids do well in high school and pass the math exam?
0:17:54 Because now college education is super important.
0:17:55 When I was little, it wasn’t like that.
0:17:59 You could go to university, you could go to an apprenticeship.
0:18:01 The inequality was quite low.
0:18:06 There was very different paths you could take and have an equally successful life as an adult.
0:18:12 So parental intensity, as you’re describing it, takes a lot of time and money and other resources.
0:18:17 How much does parental intensity drive lower fertility?
0:18:19 I think it’s an important aspect.
0:18:24 We now have some countries with ultra-low fertility rates, sometimes below one child per woman.
0:18:29 Those are also the countries with the most intensive parenting culture.
0:18:36 Famously, South Korea has now about 0.7 children per woman, which means each cohort is less than half the size of the previous one.
0:18:42 How much does access to and cost of child care impact fertility rates?
0:18:44 It impacts it a lot.
0:18:50 If you look at variation in fertility across higher-income countries, that’s one of the closest correlations you’re going to see.
0:19:00 There’s a lot of variation across these high-income countries in what they spend on child care, between a half percent of GDP at the lowest end to maybe three percent, so six times more at the upper end.
0:19:03 And this does correlate quite closely with fertility.
0:19:07 And when you say what they spend, does that mean what government spends?
0:19:08 What government spends, yes.
0:19:13 But then you have a place like the U.S. where the government spends very little on child care.
0:19:20 And yet our fertility rate, while it has fallen quite a lot, is still higher than most of, let’s say, Western and Northern Europe, yes?
0:19:25 The U.S. is actually a very interesting case because, indeed, there is very little public support for child care.
0:19:29 There’s also very little in terms of policies for parental leave and things like that.
0:19:31 One thing that also matters is social norms.
0:19:35 Does society accept that mothers are working full-time, for example?
0:19:37 On that dimension, the U.S. is doing very well.
0:19:40 Everybody thinks that’s a normal way to live your life.
0:19:47 The other thing that masked some of these issues in the past is that the U.S. used to have a very high teenage fertility rate.
0:19:50 And that made the overall numbers look fairly high.
0:19:57 Now, in the last few years, the teenage fertility rate has fallen, which is probably a good thing because many of those babies were accidental pregnancies.
0:20:05 I would think another big driver of fertility choices is access to and cost of housing.
0:20:06 What can you tell us about that?
0:20:12 That is something that should be examined more empirically, but certainly the data is very suggestive of this being important.
0:20:16 Some of the lowest fertility places, there are also very high housing cost places.
0:20:18 South Korea is one example.
0:20:24 These city-states, Hong Kong, Singapore, have extremely low fertility rates and extremely high housing costs.
0:20:28 What about cost of education, especially higher education?
0:20:33 So, in the U.S., we have essentially free education, K-12, but then college generally not free.
0:20:36 Other countries do things differently.
0:20:47 But here, if you’re deciding between, let’s say, two and three children, one child at current prices of college, four years could cost anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000, $400,000, $500,000.
0:20:51 So, what do we know about the relationship there as a driver of lower fertility?
0:20:56 Yes, we, again, don’t know anything definitive because we don’t have experiments.
0:20:57 Matthias, you people need to get to work.
0:20:59 What have you been doing this whole time?
0:21:02 It is difficult because these are decisions you can’t do in the lab.
0:21:06 Many things you can do experiments on and just to see how people react with fertility.
0:21:07 It’s difficult to do.
0:21:19 So, Matthias, the longer we talk, the more my mind gets scrambled in a very pleasant way, I have to say, because we read headlines about falling fertility and how horrible that is.
0:21:22 The general economic argument is that we need more workers.
0:21:25 We need younger people to take care of older people.
0:21:27 We need economic growth and so on.
0:21:39 But as you’re describing the way fertility and family formation have actually happened around the world and why, what people are responding to, to me, it sounds like a mostly good story.
0:21:57 If most families are having fewer children because they want to invest more in those children in terms of education and dollars, they want to spend more time with their children, they want to give their children maybe more opportunities, more love perhaps, more modeling of what a life looks like.
0:22:06 I could imagine spinning this problem around and looking at it as a potentially wonderful development in the history of civilization.
0:22:08 Would you agree with that or not quite?
0:22:09 Am I being too Pollyannish there?
0:22:11 I would completely agree with you.
0:22:21 Looking at the past, if you think about the decline from six children to two in the United States and the same thing happening in every country that’s now rich, it has been a fantastic thing.
0:22:25 Just as you say, it was because of this rise of mass education.
0:22:28 We were a mostly illiterate society in 1850.
0:22:33 Now everybody goes to at least high school and many kids go on to college and therefore have much higher earnings.
0:22:35 It’s a good thing for the economy.
0:22:39 It’s probably also a good thing for relationships of parents and children spending more time together.
0:22:42 Another aspect is what we call the demographic dividend.
0:22:45 There’s this big change in the age structure of the population.
0:22:57 When you do this one-time change from high to low population growth, you get these 30, 40 years of a very large labor force because there’s still many people entering the labor force with few people to support.
0:23:02 There’s still a small number of old people, but also not many children anymore because fertility has fallen.
0:23:03 And this is a tremendous benefit.
0:23:06 You saw that a lot in the Asian tigers in South Korea and Taiwan.
0:23:10 You saw it in China until very recently because now it’s also an aging society.
0:23:22 When you think about why fertility is falling even further now from two children to one and a half per family on average or even less, it’s not that this reflects even higher investment.
0:23:29 It used to be in the past all about this trade-off between having more children and educating them better or worse.
0:23:31 Now it’s no longer that.
0:23:33 It’s just other factors.
0:23:36 And so this benefit from lower fertility is no longer there.
0:23:51 Also, now that fertility is ultra low, there’s new downsides coming into focus, which is loss of labor force and just shrinkage of the population, which you might be depressed about if you just care about the survival of your people, but also has different implications on different people.
0:23:55 When population starts to shrink, it doesn’t shrink everywhere equally.
0:24:00 The big cities are still attractive, so people will still live in New York and Chicago, I suppose.
0:24:02 The countryside empties out first.
0:24:08 That’s both very unequal in terms of who it affects and essentially contributing to widening inequality in society.
0:24:18 So what you just described makes me acknowledge that the caution and sometimes even the panic that I read in the press about falling fertility is warranted.
0:24:30 And on the other hand, when you look at population predictions over the past hundred years or so, I mean, I have a word to describe the quality of those predictions, but let me hear your word first.
0:24:33 How good have the predictions of population generally been?
0:24:34 They have been terrible.
0:24:44 Coming up after the break, since past predictions have been terrible, should we stop trying to predict the future?
0:24:46 Come on, where’s the fun in that?
0:24:47 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:24:49 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:24:49 We’ll be right back.
0:25:05 In case you’re not old enough to remember when the world was losing its mind about overpopulation, here’s a taste.
0:25:13 The main premise is that there are 3.6 billion people in the world today, and we’re adding about 70 million a year, and that’s too many.
0:25:20 That’s Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist who, in 1968, co-wrote a book called The Population Bomb.
0:25:25 It’s too many because we are getting desperately short of food.
0:25:33 We’re very much short of other resources, and that above all, the very delicate life support systems of the planet are now severely threatened.
0:25:36 Ehrlich was appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
0:25:39 That’s how mainstream his argument was.
0:25:50 His most startling prediction was that in the very next decade, the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation, including 65 million in the U.S.
0:25:56 He wrote that India was doomed and that England will not exist in the year 2000.
0:26:05 Ehrlich certainly made valid points about the challenges of a growing population, but many of his predictions were spectacularly wrong.
0:26:11 Still, scary predictions have a way of influencing behavior and policy.
0:26:18 In 1979, China announced its one-child policy, which lasted until 2015.
0:26:22 Here, again, is the economist Matthias Dupke.
0:26:32 I do think that the most direct implication of this fear of high population growth or population control policies, and those for the most part, I think, were a complete human disaster.
0:26:35 A complete human disaster because why?
0:26:42 The one-child policy in China, one of the biggest attempts of social engineering ever attempted.
0:26:56 It had some positive economic benefits in terms of income per capita, but it was also such a drastic policy with forced abortions, massive interventions in people’s most basic choices that it was hard to have a very positive view about.
0:27:09 And in India, fossilizations were widely used, so because we had a long-term trend towards lower fertility rates, and that started almost 200 years ago, the forecasts were based on extrapolating from that.
0:27:14 And so, they did the right thing in saying that fertility will continue to decline along some path.
0:27:17 What they got wrong is how quickly that was going to happen.
0:27:24 When Asian countries entered demographic change after World War II, they did this much more rapidly than the U.S. had done previously.
0:27:27 They were also wrong about where it was going to end up.
0:27:37 For many years, population forecasts were based on the expectation that in the long-term, fertility would balance out at essentially two children per woman, which would keep the population constant.
0:27:49 There was really never much of a basis for that expectation, and now we see very clearly that fertility seems to be headed much lower, which, of course, has a big impact on future forecasts for what population is going to be.
0:27:53 So, do you blame the demographers for getting the predictions so wrong?
0:27:58 I don’t know if it’s truly the fault of the demographers, because these things are hard to predict.
0:27:59 You know, the economic conditions have changed.
0:28:09 That’s the thing about predictions, especially predictions about something as complex as global population.
0:28:13 Something is always changing, and it’s hard to factor that in.
0:28:20 As Dupka says, the global economy has changed a lot over the past several decades, arguably both for better and worse.
0:28:23 That’s a much longer conversation for another time.
0:28:30 But in terms of fertility, consider one small but interesting piece of evidence from the economic literature.
0:28:42 The conventional wisdom used to be that fertility decisions are a result of economic conditions, that boom times produced more babies and bad times produced fewer.
0:28:48 In other words, fertility was a lagging economic indicator, not a leading indicator.
0:29:00 But a 2018 research paper that looked at the 2008 global financial crisis found that fertility actually started dropping in the months before the crisis hit.
0:29:07 This suggests, if nothing else, that fertility decisions may be more of a leading indicator than was previously thought.
0:29:12 So economic uncertainty is something to think about.
0:29:19 And when it comes to making predictions in a realm as complicated as fertility, with so many variables and so many incentives,
0:29:26 There is another area of uncertainty that might surprise you, considering how long we humans have been making babies.
0:29:33 It feels unjust that we know so little about how our reproductive system works.
0:29:37 And it’s such an important part of human existence.
0:29:39 That is Diana Laird.
0:29:47 I’m a professor at University of California, San Francisco, in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and in the Stem Cell Program.
0:29:56 UCSF has been, for the past decade, the top-funded public academic institution by the NIH, the National Institutes of Health.
0:30:04 My lab is really interested in where our eggs come from, developmentally speaking, how that process plays out,
0:30:13 how it affects aging, and the 39 years in humans that we have for our ovaries to actually work and make babies.
0:30:19 Those 39 years refer to the average woman’s fertility window between puberty and menopause.
0:30:22 What we don’t know outweighs what we do know.
0:30:26 It’s, first of all, really difficult to capture those early stages.
0:30:39 We understand very little about how the embryo knows where to go and why, in many patients, there is repeated failure of implantation of the embryo.
0:30:50 Work with human embryos is not fundable by NIH dollars and, actually, with fertilized embryos, is illegal in many states.
0:30:56 So, that makes it very difficult to ask those fundamental scientific questions.
0:31:03 If you are, let’s say, a government hoping to slow down the fertility decline or even reverse it,
0:31:07 you’d think it would be useful to answer those fundamental scientific questions.
0:31:12 One question has to do with a woman’s lifetime supply of eggs.
0:31:14 Egg cells develop in the female.
0:31:19 While she’s still a fetus, it’s believed that she starts with around 7 million eggs.
0:31:22 By the time she’s born, she’ll have 1 to 2 million eggs.
0:31:25 From there, her supply continues to diminish.
0:31:27 And why is that?
0:31:35 We don’t really know how these events in the early development of the embryo connect to the number of eggs that we have eventually.
0:31:38 Laird likes to use an economic analogy here.
0:31:45 If I told you that you’re going to have an inheritance of 7 million dollars, you would probably be really happy.
0:31:52 And if I said, well, due to market conditions and volatility, by the time you’re born, it’s going to be more like 1 million.
0:31:56 You’d still probably be like, well, a million dollars is pretty good.
0:32:05 But then if I told you that, well, by the time you actually need this inheritance, it’s going to be closer to maybe $300,000 or $400,000.
0:32:08 You would think I was a really bad investor.
0:32:13 Because, you know, the eggs are our inheritance.
0:32:21 I guess I could make it worse and I could tell you that by the time you use them, a lot of those dollars are not going to be accepted because they won’t work.
0:32:23 And there’s even more uncertainty.
0:32:35 Physicians and researchers can’t accurately measure the number of eggs in a given woman’s ovarian reserves, nor do current tests reveal anything about the quality of an egg while it’s in a woman’s body.
0:32:40 How is it that a doctor can’t actually tell you how many eggs, how is it that a doctor can’t actually tell you how many eggs you have?
0:32:53 If you’re 20, how can you start to make plans about how you’re going to live your life, how you’re going to have a career, whether or not you’re going to have children, and when that might happen?
0:33:02 How can you make all those decisions if you don’t even know how long you have to reproduce and if you’ll be able to?
0:33:06 I’m not saying that everyone needs to reproduce, but I think it should be a choice.
0:33:10 It’s a very human experience and it’s how we continue our species.
0:33:20 Unfortunately, the research funds for understanding the basics of reproduction and fertility have been pretty meager.
0:33:35 Indeed, researchers have found that NIH applications with the words fertility, ovary, and reproductive have the lowest rates of funding acceptance, much lower than keywords like protein or glaucoma or mRNA.
0:33:38 It makes it a little bit less painful when I get grants rejected.
0:33:40 It’s not just me.
0:33:51 In February, President Trump signed an executive order called Expanding Access to In-Vitro Fertilization as part of his administration’s push to boost fertility rates.
0:34:00 But soon after, his administration eliminated the six-person team within the Department of Health and Human Services that tracks IVF.
0:34:09 So, if scientific research isn’t the way forward for a government that wants more babies, how about financial incentives?
0:34:11 Coming up after the break.
0:34:17 It was a decade-long experiment that really was considered unsuccessful.
0:34:21 I’m Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We’ll be right back.
0:34:34 It might be tempting to think that fertility rates have only begun falling recently.
0:34:42 One of the things that my work shows is that fertility rates have declined in other time periods and in other places.
0:34:44 That’s Amy Freud.
0:34:48 I’m a professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
0:34:54 Freud specializes in early modern Britain, women’s economic history in particular.
0:35:04 In the 1690s, England was in the midst of really the beginning of over 100 years of wars against their enemies, the French.
0:35:13 And there was a concern about being a strong and prosperous nation that could compete militarily and politically.
0:35:16 And that meant growing their populations.
0:35:21 Back then, fertility rates were very closely tied to marriage rates.
0:35:24 In many places today, that connection is much looser.
0:35:30 But King William III of England reckoned that boosting marriage would boost fertility.
0:35:34 Enter the Marriage Duty Act of 1695.
0:35:41 They began to tax bachelors over the age of 25 and widowers who were childless.
0:35:46 Sometimes elite single women were taxed as well.
0:35:51 Freud says this new tax was likely unpopular, as taxes tend to be.
0:35:52 But did it work?
0:35:56 We’re not sure that we can prove that it raised marriage rates.
0:36:00 And it also didn’t raise enough money for the king and his wars.
0:36:05 So it was abandoned in the early 1700s.
0:36:09 France, meanwhile, was also concerned about their fertility rates.
0:36:15 But rather than offer a stick in the form of a tax, they offered a carrot.
0:36:25 Louis XIV passes an edict in promotion of marriage in the 1660s, which is even a little earlier than the concern about marriage in England.
0:36:35 In this edict, he was willing to offer financial incentives to men who would marry by the age of 21, which was very young.
0:36:40 Also financial incentives to men who fathered large families.
0:36:48 As with the marriage tax in England, it’s hard for historians like Freud to prove whether these incentives boosted fertility.
0:36:56 What’s interesting is that just a few decades later, both France and England started to study fertility itself.
0:37:01 Both countries become much more concerned about what we today would call reproduction.
0:37:04 In fact, that’s an 18th century term.
0:37:10 Before that time, generation was usually the term.
0:37:18 But there’s a more scientific conceptualization of producing children that takes hold.
0:37:30 Along with it is an encouragement of new technologies and new people that might be able to ensure that childbirth is more safe and more successful.
0:37:37 In England at the time, as many as one in three babies were dying in childbirth or soon after.
0:37:42 A 33 percent infant mortality rate is horrific, right?
0:37:49 There was a feeling that perhaps female midwives were not doing an adequate job.
0:37:55 And over the 18th century, we see the introduction of the man midwife.
0:38:07 The man midwife was a male who had been educated at a college or university and who was going to bring a more scientific approach to childbirth.
0:38:13 And so men began to push female midwives out of the business of childbirth.
0:38:15 This starts at the apex of society.
0:38:20 Women of the nobility and royal women began to use male midwives.
0:38:31 At the same time, they also embrace new technologies like the forceps, which are developed by the man midwife family, the Chamberlains.
0:38:40 Side note here, the Chamberlains family hoarded their invention for more than a century, not sharing it outside their well-bred circle.
0:38:46 This withholding of the forceps is thought to have cost millions of lives.
0:38:51 In France, meanwhile, the midwife industry went in a different direction.
0:38:57 Louis XV decides that he needs to train midwives better.
0:39:00 And the person he chooses to do that is a woman.
0:39:03 Her name was Madame de Coudray.
0:39:13 Coudray was a Parisian midwife who received training and then was part of a regulated body of midwives.
0:39:18 She had some of the highest earning power amongst Parisian midwives.
0:39:34 And so the king sent her around the country to different cities and towns where she trained local female midwives in some of the up-to-date ways of delivering children that she had been taught in Paris.
0:39:40 Madame de Coudray promoted a different style of midwifery than the male midwives.
0:39:47 Female midwives would argue they didn’t need forceps because they could handle complicated births with their own hands.
0:39:55 Coudray also felt that technology, instead of being used in the birthing process, should be used in the teaching process.
0:40:09 She developed what she called her machine or her mannequin, which was a simulated pelvis of a woman with accoutrements like a fetus and a placenta.
0:40:16 She used different types of textiles and materials to try to simulate reality.
0:40:27 She would have both hard and soft materials, perhaps leather, perhaps linen, different colored materials to indicate different parts of the anatomy.
0:40:33 It shows her understanding of anatomy, her practical nature, her inventiveness.
0:40:38 Coudray also published a midwife handbook with colored anatomical plates.
0:40:47 It’s hard to prove causality, but we do see in some areas that live births and successful live births were going up.
0:41:02 There’s a wonderful book by Nina Gelbart called The King’s Midwife, where she argues that you could extrapolate the number of successful births based on Coudray’s training and then the midwives who followed her training.
0:41:06 That kind of thing can be hard to trace, though, for the 18th century.
0:41:12 And one of the sad things is so many records were destroyed in the French Revolutionary period.
0:41:24 If you go back to 18th century England, meanwhile, it does seem like there was a fertility rebound, as evidenced by new concerns about overpopulation.
0:41:32 People began to discuss the idea of limiting population as a way to improve one’s economy.
0:41:39 England is often taken as the example of a country that did that early.
0:41:49 That is associated with industrialization and the idea that perhaps not as many people are needed to work in the economy.
0:41:57 And so it’s interesting to me as a historian to see us returning to concerns about having enough workers.
0:42:02 This is really an eternal question.
0:42:09 How many people should be allowed or encouraged to exist in a given space and place?
0:42:14 This question can quickly migrate into the political sphere.
0:42:18 And from there, it’s a short step to government policy.
0:42:21 Our era is not immune.
0:42:29 This recent concern about too few babies, it can feel like whiplash after all those decades of concern about overpopulation.
0:42:36 And of course, before that, were more underpopulation worries and so on and so on and so forth.
0:42:39 I wasn’t kidding when I called it an eternal question.
0:42:41 And it swings both ways.
0:42:54 At the moment, governments in many countries are trying to boost their babyhood through tax benefits, better parental leave, cash bonuses, state-sponsored matchmaking apps, and much more.
0:42:56 Will they work?
0:43:00 Here again is the economist Matthias Stapke.
0:43:03 These are the biggest decisions we take in our lives.
0:43:09 And you see in the data that people don’t respond very strongly to short-run changes in policy.
0:43:13 Financial incentives, if you just give a bonus for having more children, no, people do respond.
0:43:15 They don’t respond very much.
0:43:17 They are in many ways set in their ways.
0:43:21 And you make a plan and you will not change it like government by government.
0:43:41 If you were secretary of higher fertility in Washington in a future time, what would be your best ideas society-wide and not just perhaps around the time of birth, but what would be your biggest society, economy-wide ideas for providing the best situation to boost fertility?
0:43:46 I think we want to imagine what kind of society will want people to have larger families.
0:43:59 One is this issue of compatibility of careers and having children that has to do with making it easier for women to rejoin the labor force after they have children.
0:44:01 More childcare provision.
0:44:07 Another part that’s also come into focus with the epidemic is this issue of flexibility of jobs.
0:44:12 If you have a job, but it’s completely inflexible, meaning you have to be there 10 hours every day, you can never leave.
0:44:18 If, for example, a child has a fever or has a theater performance, that will also make it more difficult.
0:44:26 So creating workplaces that are a bit more flexible for everybody will also make it easier for families to decide to have that additional child.
0:44:36 I went back to Catherine Pakalik, the economist mother of 14 and author of Hannah’s Children.
0:44:44 I don’t believe that policymakers ought to aim to influence household decision-making as regards children.
0:44:54 The reason I say that is because those costs and benefits, the big ones, the ones that are really affecting our current situation, those are subjective and personal.
0:44:56 Policy can’t hit those things.
0:45:03 Do you feel that that position aligns you with a particular political movement or even a name?
0:45:06 I sometimes use the language of a pragmatic libertarian.
0:45:12 Pragmatic in the sense that I’m not committed to the philosophical foundations of libertarianism.
0:45:20 You write, the flourishing of traditional religious institutions breaks the low marriage, low fertility cycle.
0:45:25 People will lay down their comfort, dreams and selves for God, not for subsidies.
0:45:27 Can you say a little bit more about that?
0:45:35 Because as the global fertility rate falls, we’re seeing more and more governments take all kinds of measures to try to boost births.
0:45:43 As far as I can tell, most of these fail or they might produce a short-term birth boom, but that seems to be just a timing thing.
0:45:46 It’s not actually encouraging people to have more children, just the timing.
0:45:55 Can you talk about the ways in which, as you write it, government subsidies are weaker than internal or religious guidance?
0:45:58 They’re weaker because they just don’t operate on the right margin.
0:46:03 We’re proud of the fact that women and girls spend 12 years in school, minimally, we hope.
0:46:10 But what happens in those 12 years of school is that we’re preparing for certain kinds of professional work.
0:46:16 That’s the margin where the conflict between family and career is happening.
0:46:23 It’s not obvious to me that subsidies of the kind that we’ve been thinking about can really get into that margin and make that adjustment.
0:46:28 Do we have to roll back women’s education in order to see higher birth rates?
0:46:30 I don’t think the answer is yes.
0:46:37 I think the answer is definitely no, but we have to ask questions about value formation and where those things come from.
0:46:49 Why shouldn’t I say, hey, Catherine, I understand that you’re making a particular religious-slash-personal argument for the beauty of having more children, and I’m cool with that, 100% cool with that.
0:47:01 On the other hand, I don’t think we really need to be having a conversation about boosting a falling fertility rate because the future is probably nowhere near as grim as the doomsayers say.
0:47:13 So should people who are worried about low fertility rate, rather than trying to come up with government policies to boost birth policies that don’t work, should we all just relax a little bit and let people do what they want to do?
0:47:14 So I’ll put it this way.
0:47:21 I do not think of my book and my work as an attempt to promote having children.
0:47:28 My work is an attempt to help people understand what are the costs and benefits and how do households make these decisions.
0:47:40 I’m attempting to show up in that conversation and say, look, that may be a policy decision that will have unintended, perhaps negative consequences, because I don’t think you can encourage this.
0:47:43 What’s a policy with fewer unintended consequences?
0:47:59 I like to think that religious liberty is a good policy decision for countries of any type at any point in time, pluralism, religious tolerance, and devolving more of the human care in society to religious communities.
0:48:04 So in a sense, I see this as a moment to say, calm down.
0:48:10 And if you want to do something, here’s something that you can do, which I think could never harm things and could only help.
0:48:17 I have to say, I only have two kids, but I like them so much, I wish I had a couple more just like them.
0:48:18 I get that.
0:48:23 There’s limits, but I would certainly love to have a few more.
0:48:27 That again was Catherine Pakalik.
0:48:32 Thanks to her, to Matthias Dupka, Diana Laird, Amy Freud.
0:48:35 And thanks especially to you for listening.
0:48:38 I hope you will spread the word about our show.
0:48:40 That is the biggest thank you we could ask for.
0:48:47 If you would rather complain, you can write directly to us at radio at Freakonomics.com.
0:48:56 Coming up next time, part two in our Cradle to Grave series, we advance in age, but go back in time.
0:49:01 So you’re a middle class, middle aged artisan in the Middle Ages.
0:49:03 Yes, that’s a lot of middle.
0:49:05 And we ask this question.
0:49:08 If you could go back, would you go back?
0:49:13 If certain conditions are met, I guess I would, yeah, because it’s a much simpler life.
0:49:19 One of the things that would be shocking would be the level of casual cruelty.
0:49:23 What was it like to be middle aged in the Middle Ages?
0:49:24 That’s next time.
0:49:26 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:49:28 And if you can, someone else too.
0:49:32 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:49:38 This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jeremy Johnston.
0:49:49 The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Alina Cullman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Sarah Lilly, Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski.
0:49:55 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:50:07 Our hands and feet develop as this disc, but then between the bones of our fingers, the cells actually die through this process called apoptosis.
0:50:10 But if you’re a duck, they don’t.
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