Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Stephen Malanga. Steve's been on the show a number of times.

He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and City Journal's senior editor.

He writes about state and local governance, economic policy, and many other matters ranging from pension funding to pot legalization. His work has been

featured in many outlets, along with City Journal, including the Wall Street Journal, where he

appears regularly, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Today we're going to be

discussing some of his recent writing, including his piece, Baby Blues,

which appears in our spring issue, and looks at American states varying birth rates in their

relationship to politics. So, Steve, thanks very much, as always, for joining us.

Well, thank you for having me. So as you know, American fertility, which has been, you know, not particularly robust,

plummeted during COVID.

And it's continued to decline as we've come out of the pandemic, or at least continued to be,

you know, pretty bad.

Last year, the U.S. birth rate reached, in fact, an all-time low of

1.62 children per women, and that's well below what demographers call a replacement rate,

which is 2.1, which means you have, you know, 2.1 children. You note in your essay that individual state's fertility rates follow a pattern,

and this is what is kind of eye-opening. So those currently with the highest birth rates are

overwhelmingly Republican, and those with the lowest are disproportionately Democrat.

So I wonder, what does that mean? Can you describe

the correspondence between state's birth rates and their political affiliations? And is that something

new or has that been, you know, something that has persisted across a period of time?

Yeah, so I think the first thing we need to say is that the reason we are interested and concerned about this is that around the world we have seen other nations for years.

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