Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

While I think the trend toward delayed parenthood is a big problem & maternal age is the best indicator for that, this is not a lady problem. I don’t even think this mess has much to do w feminism or tinder. Cultural pessimism, memes about parents + deranged norms do the trick

Why is delayed parenthood a problem? Increased health risks? Or something else?

Also: non-linearly increasing risk of fertility problems, constrained family sizes, higher risk of having to do it without multigenerational support, higher risk of the death of a parent before the children are self-sufficient

tbh, of these, the fertility/family size thing is the big one to me — if you have a couple kids, discover that they’re pretty happy & you love having them, it is a MAJOR loss to the world that you just turned 40 & will probably struggle to have more

As Bryan Caplan has argued, the transition from 0 to 1 children is many times more costly than 1 to 2, or 2 to 3. When most people delay childbearing to the very end of the 1.5 decade span of decent fertility, society has many fewer children at a much higher cost