Lyman Stone
Demographer and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, writing on fertility decline, birth rates and the cost of raising ch...
“Crisis is almost always a moment of climax, a turning point, a pivot. And that's not how fertility works. … It is a train coming at you from a long distance away and it looks real slow moving. Someday it hits you, but it's not because it sped up at the last minute. It was always coming.”
Freakonomics Radio · Ideas & Essays · November 2026
Context
Asked whether he accepts the phrase "fertility crisis," Stone rejects the word because falling birth rates are a slow trend visible for decades rather than a sudden break. He still calls it a very serious long-run problem.
Transcript
…drag out fights about like a fraction of a percentage change in something because, oh, this data says there's, you know, this many million births in India, and this data says 3% difference, and this is a huge error. And then you look at the GDP numbers and they're like, oh, we revised it by 15%.
Okay, I will accept your defense of demography in general. A phrase we hear a lot, including in the U.S., is fertility crisis. Do you agree with that characterization? And if so, what exactly is the crisis?
Crisis is almost always a moment of climax, a turning point, a pivot. And that's not how fertility works. It's not like one day the fertility rate is fine and dandy and the next day you have a crisis. It is a train coming at you from a long distance away and it looks real slow moving. Someday it hits you, but it's not because it sped up at the last minute. It was always coming. It's a very serious issue. It's a long-run problem, but I don't like the crisis language.
So tell me why it's a long-run problem. As we've all been reading for decades now, the conventional wisdom is that you need more young people to support a society from the ground up, but especially because a lot of the payments that go to older people in retirement, Medicare, Social Security, et…
AI productivity growth might replace all the young workers. Sure, yeah.
There you go. So do you see that demographic problem as we've been reading about for decades as problematic as non-demographers do?
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