“If as a society your default is two, you are going to end up with 1.4. Why? Because you are going to have a percentage of women that, for whatever the reason, don't have children, maybe biological or maybe by choice. And you are going to have also a non-trivial percentage of women that are going to stay at one. And you are going to have next to nobody with three or more.”
EconTalk · In-Depth Interviews · October 2026
On EconTalk, Fernandez-Villaverde explains why a country where most families have two children still ends up far below replacement fertility. He argues that getting back to replacement takes many families with three children, and that modern society has made a third child very hard.
Transcript
…with more than two children. It's really very difficult to have three children. It really conflicts with your work, with your professional career. Housing is very expensive, and with three children, you need a bigger house. So, most families are opting for two. Now, you're saying, well, that have
children. Most families that have children. That's
exactly what I'm going. That's exactly what I'm going. And what we try to argue in the paper is: if as a society your default is two, you are going to end up with 1.4. Why? Because you are going to have a percentage of women that, for whatever the reason, don't have children, maybe biological or maybe by choice. And you are going to have also a non-trivial percentage of women that are going to stay at one. And you are going to have next to nobody with three or more. So, if as a society your default is two, you end up with 1.4. And that's something that I really think most people have not internalized. So, when we are talking about countries like the United Kingdom at 1.4, you will go to a park and you will see children playing. Most children will be playing with a sibling. It's not that they are long, it's not like the one child in China. And yet, with two…
Well, fortunately, I'm an economist because if I weren't, I might be tempted to say, well, you're obviously wrong because we have four kids, but we are the exception. And obviously, we're very aware that that's an unusually large family when we lived in the United States. Here in Israel, it's not…
2.5, 2.6. Okay,
so above replacement rate, their poor population growing steadily, as we know, many more people in the United States today than there were in 1950. Something changed. We don't know what that is. You point to in the paper, by the way, and it's a very readable paper for non, the things you want to…
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