This past July, Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance faced criticism for his 2021 comments on Fox News, where he described the Democrat Party as being run by "childless cat ladies" and people "without children." He later clarified on the Megyn Kelly Show that his remarks were aimed at what he perceives as the party's "anti-children" and "anti-family" policies, rather than women who are unable to have children.
While the remarks were understandably offensive to some, the public discussion around Vance's incendiary comments has drawn attention to shifting support bases between the two parties. More specifically, Democrats have seen growing support from single women, with 68% of single women voting Democrat in the 2022 midterms, while majorities of married men, married women, and single men all voted in favor of Republicans.1 Thus, it stands to reason that due to these shifts in voting bases, the parties may have different focuses with respect to policy that are more in line with their respective base’s priorities and cultural attitudes. It also appears that this cultural divergence is not just happening between voting bases but also between younger and older generations. According to a recent Pew Research poll, 47% of adults aged 18 to 49 do not plan to have children, up from 37% five years ago, with the majority (57%) citing a lack of desire ("just don't want to") rather than medical reasons (13%), suggesting significant shifts in broader cultural attitudes toward family and childbearing.
For as long as Western society has existed, conversations about these cultural dynamics were central because obviously absent a willingness on part of men and women to start families and have kids, societies cease to exist. And while capitalist systems enshrine concepts of individualism, there were collectively understood civic duties and expectations that were largely engendered through religious observance.
One major intellectual who commented on the dual importance of capitalism and civic duties was Friedrich Hayek. While generally known as a libertarian, in 1988, the famed Nobel-prize winning economist published his book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism in which he discussed both the economic and social flaws of collectivist societies. On the economic front, chief among these is the fact that political and economic systems based on collectivist ideas invariably failed to account for the basic realities of human nature and as a consequence reliably resulted in both mass economic inefficiency and the eradication of civil liberties.
Hayek explained that central planners simply lack the ability through reason alone to anticipate every single change that may happen in a given market, and therefore they always fail in properly meeting market demand. In Hayek’s view, efficient economies instead depend on “spontaneous order” which emerges from the unobstructed, innumerable, seemingly random individual decisions that ultimately determine market supply and demand and result in an efficient price. If central planners wanted to be able to keep pace with the many random changes to consumer tastes and decisions, there would necessarily need to be restrictions on consumers’ behaviors and individual freedom.
However, while Hayek’s basic economic critiques of socialism may be well-known to economically inclined audiences, a vitally important part of his argument that has often been neglected is that Hayek viewed religion and tradition as necessary conditions in the maintenance of a free and functioning society. Hayek explained,
We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted at least long enough to enable those groups following them to grow, and to have the opportunity to spread by natural or cultural selection. This means that, like it or not, we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilization that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true – or verifiable or testable – in the same sense as are scientific statements, and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation.2
If it is not apparent from Hayek’s own explanation, he himself was not a dogmatic believer in Christian or Jewish religious traditions; however, he did see value in what he described as “symbolic truths” that emerged from these faiths, and he viewed them as responsible for laying the necessary foundational framework for functioning societies.
Basis for Hayek’s Views on Religious Traditions
This argument has recently become more in vogue with various public intellectuals. For example, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has famously embraced a version of Hayek’s “symbolic truths” argument, arguing that the Bible’s historicity is not as important as are the mythological archetypes within it that reveal important insights into understanding human nature and how to structure society. Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew whose mass following is hardly limited to those of his faith, argues that the flourishing of the West has its roots in the twin pillars of Jerusalem and Athens. Hoover Institution research fellow and UnHerd columnist Ayaan Hirsi Ali just last year wrote that she now identifies as a Christian not in the literal sense but in a similar sense as set forth by Hayek and Peterson, in that she views the legacy of Judeo-Christian tradition as a necessity in fending off the West from its many enemies. Finally, even famed Oxford biologist, ardent atheist, and author of the best-selling book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins admitted in an interview that he identifies himself as a “cultural Christian.” He explained that he “feels at home in the Christian ethos” and that those in the U.K. are a in a “‘Christian country’ in that sense.”
But what are these important, foundational ideas that these figures are alluding to that supposedly allow for societies to function successfully? As Hayek sees it, these ideas primarily have to do with the encouragement of family formation and the respect for private property, which are explicitly discouraged in communist and socialist states. And while these ideas are not entirely endorsed on every single page of religious texts, Hayek explains that “only the religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.”3 As discussed in a 2019 book by Harvard’s Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary entitled The Wealth of Religions, religion may encourage prosperity in a variety of ways including its connection to work ethic, personal integrity, and education.
One of the more influential modern-day atheists who opposed this view of organized monotheistic religions was the late Vanity Fair essayist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens often stated that he took offense in the very notion of needing a “celestial dictator” to give him his cues on right and wrong. In his memoir Hitch-22, he takes on this question more pointedly:
About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension…I attract pitying looks and anxious questions…How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about? Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content.)
But as offended as Hitchens may have been by the question, he does not himself give a particularly clear account as to what should ground human behavior. And, while religious traditions have histories that are littered with moments that would likely be considered objectionable in our modern age, there do appear at least to be strong circumstantial reasons to believe that the practice, interpretation, and reform of these religions and their traditions over thousands of years have allowed Western societies to encourage both pro-social behaviors and prosperous economies.
How These Ideas Manifest in Decision Making and Life Outcomes
Economics as a discipline has generally not emphasized the influence of religious and moral thinking on the development of social trends and attitudes that ultimately express themselves in markets. Instead, economics has evolved to emphasize the role of incentives in shaping human behavior. Key examples include Nobel Prize winners Gary Becker, who underscored that the way to reduce anti-social behaviors is to make the costs greater than the benefits, and Richard Thaler, famous for his design of “nudges” that are designed to influence behavior like saving.
We certainly agree that incentives play a vital role in human behavior. Crime rises when crime pays, and it falls when it does not.4 Attempts to address drug abuse and homelessness are often hampered by policies that limit the use of incentives-based approaches, and the realignment of incentives is a critical ingredient in turning around these epidemics.5 These are cases where the incentives provided by government policy are in fact completely backward, incentivizing the very behavior that is societally destructive.
However, it is a serious question whether economic and social problems can be solved under a strictly technocratic lens. Data that look at economic or social phenomena can describe certain societal dynamics, but often how these problems manifest say more about the cultural attitudes of the people involved than they do about one government policy.
With this in mind, let’s return to the issue of childcare and childbearing. Various media outlets and “experts” have recently suggested that one of the primary reasons people are not having kids has to do with the rising costs of childcare. According to one source, 3 in 5 millennials will say they are putting off having children due to mounting costs associated with doing so.6 Thus, the thinking goes that more must be done to help families financially since these trends are ultimately causing the fertility rate to fall well below replacement.7
Yet the evidence around offering financial incentives to induce greater levels of childbearing has had limited results and deserves greater scrutiny particularly when considering the price tag of such policies. For example, Hungary has been offering large financial incentives including no income taxes for life for women who have more than 3 kids as well debt forgiveness and major subsidies for home ownership. These benefits amount to almost 5 percent of the country’s GDP. Yet, over the last ten years the fertility rate has only increased from 1.23 to just 1.50 – still well below replacement level of 2.1.8
In Poland in 2016, the government passed legislation which gave a monthly allowance of 500 PLN or $130 per child to families having children (initially for second and subsequent children, but soon after the policy was amended to include first children as well). Yet still, after seeing an initial spike in the fertility rate in 2017 after the passage of the policy, the fertility rate dropped to around pre-legislation levels, falling to 1.33 in 2021 (the rate was 1.32 in 2015).9 In general, despite the significant costs of state investment into pro-natalist policies, studies have shown mixed results as to whether we can simply pay our way out of this issue, and thus this should make people skeptical of claims coming from political figures in the United States about the family formation benefits associated with any single policy such as simply increasing the child tax credit.
However, when looking at fertility rates in the United States across religious attendance rates, one finds a much different story. Fertility rates have remained largely unchanged over the last 40 years across groups with various degrees of religiosity, but those most religiously engaged largely managed to maintain fertility rates above replacement over this timeframe. As the Institute for Family Studies explain in a 2022 blog post, individuals who attended religious services “weekly or more” as of 2019 had fertility rates of 2.1-2.2, which is actually higher than this same group’s fertility rate of 2.0 in 1982. For those attending religious services “less than weekly”, the rate also increased but only slightly and the rate remained below replacement for entire period at about 1.7-1.8 children per woman. Finally, those who consider themselves “nonreligious” had the lowest fertility rate with a constant rate of around 1.4 over the same timeframe.
What has significantly changed is the percentage of people who identify within each category of religious observance. The percentage of those who attended religious services “weekly or more” fell from over 30 percent to about 20 percent over this 40-year period, while the percentage of those who attended “less than weekly” fell from over 60 percent to between 45-50 percent. Naturally, while these groups fell by sizable amounts, the percentage of those who consider themselves “nonreligious” increased from around 5 percent in 1982 to around 30 percent in 2019.10
Thus, the continued secular trend of the country-level fertility rate falling below replacement seems more to do with ongoing shifting cultural compositions of those who identify as religious and less to do with the any individual financial metric. It is not possible to know whether the effects on fertility rates are operating through religion itself or the communities into which it brings observers, but the patterns themselves are clear.
It should be no secret that these attitudinal differences can be extremely pronounced when comparing the attitudes of Republican and Democrat voters, as Republican voters tend to be more religious.11 In a poll from June, Pew Research found that 59 percent of Trump supporters believed “society is better if people prioritize marriage and family” to just 19 percent of Biden supporters. As one may expect, Republican voters tend to have higher fertility rates than their Democrat counterparts.12
And while causality cannot be established, for all the consternation related to the supposed financial anxieties and immensely burdensome sacrifices associated with having children, overall both married mothers and fathers with children report the highest rates of being “very happy” and overall happiness in general compared to all other categories – that is, compared to married men and women without children, unmarried mothers and fathers with children, and single men and women. Even more shocking, despite the many challenges associated with single motherhood, single mothers report higher rates of happiness than do single women without children.13
Further, when looking at general mental health well-being across political ideologies, conservative men and women tend to report much better mental health outcomes than do liberals. In fact, according to a 2020 Pew Research Poll more than half of liberal women 18-29-years-old reported at some point being told by a doctor or healthcare provider that they have a mental health condition. Further, despite women being much more likely to seek mental health help than men14 in the event of distress, 18–29-year-old conservative women were still 50 percent less likely than liberal men to report ever being diagnosed with a mental health condition.15
Why All of This Matters
There are, of course, many factors at play in determining overall levels of happiness and mental health outcomes; however, what seems clear is that the values conferred onto a citizenry through religious observation, marriage, and having children show a clear positive impact on those things. In fact, as of now, the evidence appears that, at least directionally, there are significant benefits. And, while there are many contrasting ideas as to how best orient the country for a better future, what should be obvious is that in order to have a country in the future, you will need people. Even the most ardent statist technocrat will face difficulty in advocating for a more expansive role for the state in providing the elderly more retirement benefits when there is no tax base to support that expansive role.16
Even though we come from the academy ourselves and believe that masters degrees and PhDs are useful, they should by no means be taken in and of themselves as conferring some status of infallibility on those who obtain them. People are not machines for whom perfect “solutions” can be obtained through a convoluted, Rube-Goldberg economics machine. In fact, just last year a paper comparing social scientists’ forecasts against the general public’s in predicting social changes found no difference in accuracy between the two groups,17 which should lend credence to the concerns Hayek expressed about surrendering our liberties and property rights to central planners seeking to control markets.
People – whether they be government bureaucrats, corporate CEOs, or famous academics – are prone to error no matter how clever their ideas may appear to be. Thus, we view constraining any one person’s or bureaucracy’s ability to impact the personal liberties of groups of people extremely important based on the vast history of leaders’ misguided efforts in implementing various policy agendas with promises of utopian outcomes, even if those agendas come at the great cost of the citizenry’s civil liberties. The reality about human capacity for miscalculation is as true now as it has ever been, and there are certain lines – particularly those related to liberty and property – that should never be crossed.
Yet the idea of constraining the state’s capacity for technocratic control appears to have become a rather unpopular view among the credentialed class. On the economic front, many in this class seem to want perceived issues in the market solved more aggressively by government bureaucrats and through stricter regulatory policy. That is why, for example, so many bemoaned the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Chevron deference – or the authority granted to federal agencies to interpret federal statutes passed by Congress. On a social level, many in this class regard religious observance as antiquated and definitionally bigoted,18 and thus adopting traditions from those faiths into one’s own life is seen as inherently problematic. Meanwhile, in the political and economic arenas using various technocratic justifications, rules, regulations, and incursions on people’s lives have become the standard and assumed role of the state and the many unelected bureaucrats who occupy agency halls in Washington D.C.
This was not always the case. For example, in 1962, Democrat President John F. Kennedy writing to Congress wrote this of his expectations for a successful welfare policy,
The goals of our public welfare program must be positive and constructive… [The welfare program] must stress the integrity and preservation of the family unit. It must contribute to the attack on dependency, juvenile delinquency, family breakdown, illegitimacy, ill health, and disability. It must reduce the incidence of these problems, prevent their occurrence and recurrence, and strengthen and protect the vulnerable in a highly competitive world.19
Yet, it appears that in all the areas of concern noted by President Kennedy, the outcomes have become demonstrably worse and the values driving his concerns seemingly forgotten or out of style in the decades that followed.20
During this campaign season, we have seen what appears to be the culmination of an almost decade long campaign to regain and maintain power through any means necessary, even if this effort requires jettisoning all principle through weaponizing the intelligence agencies with bogus investigations,21 the legal system through unprecedented and largely unfounded indictments,22 and finally our supposed “free press” through the laundering of exaggerated narratives in demonizing particular political candidates deemed politically inconvenient.23 Yet, still, “experts” from this class remain bewildered at the loss of Americans’ trust in institutions, and when confronted with this reality double down on their misguided approaches through counterproductive policies like trying to clamp down on Americans’ ability to opine freely online through government-guided “misinformation” policies.24
Policymakers should seek not to simply impose their visions through expensive technocratic welfare programs, the weaponization of institutions, or through aggressive regulatory policy enforced by bureaucratic agencies. Instead, they should seek to inspire their country’s citizenry through considering the long-run good of the country and by emphasizing the pro-social values that have sustained their nation’s successful trajectory – those primarily being the monotheistic traditions that have sustained the nation since its inception and made it the most successful and prosperous nation ever conceived. They may well find that the public responds better to an approach grounded in higher values and principles than to the counterproductive approaches that have taken root over the last century.
Hayek, Friedrich. The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism. pp. 136-137.
Hayek, Friedrich. The Fatal Conceit: Errors of Socialism. p. 137.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/467428
https://www.hoover.org/press-releases/hoover-institution-releases-report-providing-solutions-homelessness-california
https://money.com/child-care-costs-declining-birth-rate/
https://missouriindependent.com/2023/05/15/low-fertility-rates-high-housing-prices-mean-fewer-children-in-most-states/
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/05/are-hungarian-pro-fertility-policies-failing.html
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-populist-right-want-you-make-more-babies-viktor-orban/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide#:~:text=As%20can%20be%20seen%2C%20fertility,it%20was%20once%20again%20rising
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/party-identification-among-religious-groups-and-religiously-unaffiliated-voters/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advantage
https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-is-happiest-married-mothers-and-fathers-per-the-latest-general-social-survey
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2845878/#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20most%20common,socioemotional%20leadership%20in%20the%20family
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand-the-well-being-gap-between-liberals-and-conservatives/
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v66n4/v66n4p37.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01517-1#Sec3
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/05/americans-religion-rightwing-politics-decline
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/05/americans-religion-rightwing-politics-decline
https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-welfare-system
https://nypost.com/2023/05/15/fbi-doj-failed-to-observe-fidelity-to-the-law-in-trump-russia-investigation-durham/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html
https://x.com/newrepublic/status/1810009748697448541?lang=en
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/misinformation-is-eroding-the-publics-confidence-in-democracy/