I do not believe the fertility crisis is, at its core, about economic factors. Out of my 20 or so closest friends from Harvard, only two of us have kids at 30. These are all people in top 1-5% of income for their age bracket, extremely privileged wrt job security. They aren’t having kids, and it’s not because they are worried they can’t afford them. They are simply doing other things. They are traveling Europe, or flying to Vegas to see concerts, or focusing on their careers/personal interests/hobbies. They have too much they want to do “before kids”, so they are waiting. A lot of people in my peer group stuck in a kind of statis, trying to extend their 20s infinitely. “Millennials think they are still teenagers,” as Logo puts it. So I see the fertility crisis as more of a spiritual issue. People lack the desire to start families. And why would they when way, way more cultural weight is placed on things like personal growth and career achievement and “having fun”. It’s not high status to be a parent, in the way becoming a founder or a doctor or earning a PhD is. Economic uncertainty has always and will always exist. That’s not going to be what raises fertility rates. Fertility rates will go up when raising children becomes the default first priority, not a second or third priority that you “get to” after a bunch of personal achievements. This requires a fundamentally different cultural narrative that reorients people around a project that is bigger than themselves.

I would bet my entire net worth that: 1. We will have ads in AI 2. If they take the form of highly-relevant offers, users will welcome them, they’ll have sky-high conversion rate, and Web shopping will die 3. They will be necessary to pay for the compute in many consumer AI apps