Lyman Stone

Plus, a new report from the Institute for Family Studies finds that it's not just economic factors that shape the birth rates in the U.S., but faith, family, friends, and Even celebrity culture influences it all.

Well, one of the authors of this report, Dr. Lyman Stone, will be joining us to unpack all the findings in that report.

And chat, GBT is in the news.

Nearly 70 million requests every week related to religion.

And all of that was highlighted in an extensive new joint report that was released this week by the Institute for Family Studies and Wheatley Institute.

So what did the researchers find? Well, joining us now to break it all down for us is one of the authors of the report, Dr.

Lyman Stone.

He's a senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

Our next guest is setting out to find what exactly is motivating people to have more children and what role specific cultural forces play.

It's Lyman Stone, Director of Research for Demographic Intelligence and Director of the Pro-Natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

Lyman, great to have you on, sir.

It's always good to be with you.

What was actually going on and why was it going? Well, one thing was the spread of of contraceptive technology.

And there was a famous case of my friend Lyman Stone, who you may know about in the States, has done some very interesting work.

Actually, he's pointed pointed this work out to me.

I wasn't aware of it, which is that there was quite a careful study on.

[gentle music] Today's conversation deals pretty heavily with one important question, which is, how do we help families thrive in the present day? And today's episode features two guests, both of whom have a lot of knowledge and experience discussing this very topic.

My guests' names are Darby Saxbe and Lyman Stone.

Darby is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Southern California who writes about fatherhood, families, and gender roles.

Lyman is a demographer and the director of the Pro-Natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

So what you're about to hear is genuinely the first time these two people have ever talked to each other out loud.

They come at this topic from different directions, so it was really fun to see them hash it all out.

Now, here's Darby Saxbe and Lyman Stone.

[gentle music] Darby Saxbe, Lyman Stone, thank you so much for taking the time to come onto this podcast.

The Institute for Family Studies surveyed more than 65,000 parents and children and asked about the kinds of things parents let children do.

Here is researcher Lyman Stone.

The big takeaway was, wow, kids today really have very little autonomy, freedom, very few experiences.

Stone believes this affects how much parents enjoy their children and whether they decide to have more.

And I think about this in terms of it could be large social forces are the result of two or three discrete things that when in combination yield this sort of global zeitgeist thing.

And I remember Lyman Stone giving a presentation about demography, this demography stuff once.

And he said, look, it's kind of depressing, but there's a correlation between living near good beach vacation places that you can get to on a weekend and And lower fertility rates because it's a discretionary dollar kind of calculation that at the margins and at scale people are making.

And this sort of lifestyle stuff provides a sort of barrier to entry for family formation because you're having a good time.

So hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Modern Macro Talks.

I'm Alejandro, and today we're joined by Lyman Stone.

Lyman is a director of research of the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence and the director of Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute of Family Studies.

He's also on Substack, where he writes about the determinants of the fertility transitions and things like the efficacy of pronatalist policies, which, by the way, will be the focus of today's conversation.