A Family Bill for a Shrinking U.S.

The declining birth rate in the United States is often discussed not only as a major demographic shift, but as a looming economic disaster. Ideas being pitched to the White House include a $5,000 baby bonus for new parents and (truly) giving medals to women who have a half-dozen babies. But what are the real contours of this supposed crisis? Indeed, according to economist Kathryn Edwards, if we haven’t done anything to remove the constraints on having kids, can we call it a crisis at all? ✨ Support the Optimist Economy podcast at: https://optimisteconomy.substack.com/subscribe or https://buymeacoffee.com/optimisteconomy ✨ You can also find Optimist Economy on: TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@optimist_economy YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@optimist_economy Instagram https://www.instagram.com/optimist_economy/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy were about as different as two politicians could be. The lanky businessman and the stout old senator, the conservative darling and the liberal icon. But did you know they once teamed up to tackle an elusive challenge: universal health care?

• 0:16Robin Rauzi?

  This is a politician's dream.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  In season four of the Big Dig podcast, we tell the story of Romney Care and the odd couple alliance behind it. Find Mitt and Ted wherever you listen.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Welcome to Spinning My Yarn About Texas. Or should we do our actual show? We should do our actual show.

• 0:37Robin Rauzi?

  I think we should try to do an actual show.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.

• 0:48Robin Rauzi?

  I'm Robin.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  And on this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time. Starting today with an announcement that we have a newsletter. If you go to optimist economy dot com, optimist econ dot com, you can subscribe, you can read letters that we get from listeners like you about the shows that we've produced. You can also go to buy me a coffee dot com and find Optimist Economy and support us with your dollars, which we will absolutely accept because as we are learning, it costs money to produce a show, so.

• 1:29Robin Rauzi?

  Turns out.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Turns out.

• 1:30Robin Rauzi?

  Turns out in a capitalist economy.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Turns out. Bummer. I should have seen it coming.

• 1:35Robin Rauzi?

  You should have seen it, exactly. Also, if you like this podcast and we would like to keep doing it, tell someone about it, maybe two people about it, and review us on Apple Podcasts.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  And a reminder that if you become a paying subscriber to our newsletter, a way to support the production of this audio show, which is obviously very clear, if that wasn't clear originally, the email that's a written thing supports the talking thing. I don't know if that was clear.

• 2:02Robin Rauzi?

  Think of it as supporting the optimist community.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  The optimist community. A reminder that we do have a spiritual sponsor level, and should you contribute to the spiritual sponsor level, we will happily read a note from you on air. And we had one last week, but we don't have one this week, so. This could be you. This could be your time.

• 2:21Robin Rauzi?

  It could be, right here.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Right here. Okay, let's go to Retcon.

• 2:26Robin Rauzi?

  I think that we should invite our new readers into the lexicon of optimist economy and remind people that Retcon is for retroactive continuity. This is where we make additions or reflections on the previous episode.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Or corrections.

• 2:40Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, or corrections.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Or corrections.

• 2:42Robin Rauzi?

  Do you have a correction?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:44Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  I just want to make sure that they don't get surprised if they're like, what, they're correcting? Do you have a Retcon from our last conversation about the long game?

• 2:52Robin Rauzi?

  I do. So, yeah, we sort of called our last episode, The Long Game, about how long major changes take. And afterward, it put me into the mind of gay marriage, which I think sometimes we think of as being a very, something that happened pretty quickly. And as somebody who lived it, and for all the good and bad of it, I can tell you that the first cases around gay marriage were in the 70s. The real fight starts at the state level in 1993. And that, of course, we don't get the marriages in Massachusetts, I think, until 2004. For those of us in California, we remember that same year, Gavin Newsom marrying people in

• 3:36Robin Rauzi?

  the city of San Francisco. Anyway, you know, it isn't until 2015 that the Supreme Court ruling comes down. And it was a much longer time, I think, than people remember, and it requires a lot of groundwork.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  And should the mercurial Supreme Court change its mind? The only places where gay marriage would still be legal is where it's on the books on the state level.

• 3:56Robin Rauzi?

  On the state level.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Which is not 50 states.

• 3:58Robin Rauzi?

  No.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  The majority of states haven't passed it.

• 4:00Robin Rauzi?

  You know, I don't know if I've told you this, about all the various times and ways that Amy and I were married.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  No. How many times have you been married?

• 4:07Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I mean, we don't entirely, I mean, there's sort of, you know, official legal times and then important ceremonial times. But we were supposed to get married in San Francisco in 2004.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Oh, during the Newsom.

• 4:20Robin Rauzi?

  During the Newsom thing. And you had to make an appointment after the first kind of chaos of the day. So we had an appointment on a Monday. We were literally packed, our car was packed. And our mothers were both in the air flying to San Francisco on Friday. And they stopped marrying people Friday afternoon. The news went over the news wire on the AP wire. And my colleague, I was off work, but my colleague Kevin called me at home and he goes, "Look, I really hate to tell you this."

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 4:50Robin Rauzi?

  So it was like, but we still had to go because our mothers were there. And so we had, it was like the saddest trip to San Francisco in the history of vacations, San Francisco. But we were already, I think, registered as domestic partners. And then I think we had to upgrade our, to like a different kind of domestic partnership. Then we actually had a ceremony that was only, you know, official to us. And then in 2008, when it was legal before Prop 8 passed, we actually got married in a family courtroom. It was like a children's court. It was a very funny place to get married. But there was a gay judge and he was marrying people before, because we all knew that the vote was coming on Prop 8. He was marrying people. His name was Zach and he did the bit from Princess Bride.

• 5:35Robin Rauzi?

  Marriage is a dweeb within a dweeb. Which was fabulous.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  No, no notes.

• 5:45Robin Rauzi?

  Ten for ten. Yeah, so I've been, you know, in various ways married maybe three, four times.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  And you know what? I wasn't invited to any of those weddings, just so everybody knows. Four times and never got the invite.

• 5:55Robin Rauzi?

  Four, yeah, it's true. It's because you were still in college.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I appreciate your long, I appreciate your personal long game story. I love it. I can't really follow your retcon about getting married so many times with like whatever weird retcon thing I was gonna have, Robin.

• 6:10Robin Rauzi?

  We don't need to put in my five marriage story.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, 100% have to put in that you get married so much.

• 6:18Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, to the same person.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Same person smiled. I mean, mine was like not as uplifting or really as cute as your story. Mine was just that the long game keeps going. And I read in the Wall Street Journal this morning that Ron DeSantis is, you know, pushing back child labor law even still in the state of Florida. And the, and the person behind it, it's all about parental rights. And if parents want to put their kids to work to teach them a lesson, like the state shouldn't be able to say no, which was the exact argument they made in like 1920. But I wanted to also clarify for listeners, don't freak out too much, that the federal law for child labor is the floor.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  And after it passed, many states passed their own Fair Labor Standards Act that goes above what the federal minimum requires. You know this because some states have a higher minimum wage. Well, they also have higher child labor standards. So the movement that's happening on the state level is that states are walking back their own laws. They're not walking back the federal law. The federal law is still there. Somebody tried to go below it and the federal government was like, no.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  You can tell employers that they're allowed to go below the federal law, but we will prosecute them. So that was meant to be a, the fight is ongoing. It's, it's never one and done, but we, we take the victories where we have them. And even when we walk backwards, there's still quivers in the, arrows in the quiver. Did I get it? Quivers in the arrow, arrows in the quiver.

• 7:48Robin Rauzi?

  I know, it's arrows in the quiver.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  I don't know why I try to say stuff like this. Like, do you know my nickname in high school was Dubya?

• 7:54Robin Rauzi?

  As in?

• 7:55Speaker 02

  George Dubya.

• 7:56Robin Rauzi?

  George Dubya?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Yes, because in high school debate, I would get so excited and animated when I was talking, I would make the same type of like word mistakes and like portmanteau words that aren't actual portmanteaus and I'd mash them up. I would do that all the time. So my nickname was, I mean, I'm a senior year book, there's like, hey Dub, and I was Dubya, uh, because I would make the same type of verbal errors that he did.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Strategery.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Is it stupid to still flex that I made it to nationals or like?

• 8:24Robin Rauzi?

  Of course you did. I don't know how I wound up on a podcast playing straight man to an economist, but now I know.

• 8:33Robin Rauzi?

  All right. Did you look anything up for terms and conditions?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Terms and conditions. I want to hear yours first.

• 8:39Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. You notice that I wrote in how to pronounce it?

• 8:42Speaker 02

  It doesn't, it still wouldn't be able to do it.

• 8:46Robin Rauzi?

  Seniorage.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Seniorage.

• 8:49Robin Rauzi?

  Seniorage.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Seniorage.

• 8:51Robin Rauzi?

  It's the money that the mint makes on the coins that it produces.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 8:56Robin Rauzi?

  So this came up because if you didn't read it, the story about the pennies from the New York Times, which ran in the, I don't know, before the election in the fall, about how much it costs to make pennies and the like spiral we're in about pennies. It's just a great read. It's just a really, it's a long, funny essay. And then, of course, the president has said that he would like to get rid of the penny. Congress has to do that. But there's also an interesting story, and I will put this in the show notes. The show notes, by the way, are on optimist economy.com. You can check them out there. That if you get rid of pennies, it creates this problem where we'll need more nickels and that nickels are even more expensive to make than pennies.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  World's strongest economy right here.

• 9:44Robin Rauzi?

  So, anyway, that's why I wound up looking up seniorage.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Seniorage. All right. So I guess the only answer is for the US mint to have more sheets of $2 bills that you buy in the gift shop. And I think they need to counterweight the penny nickel problem with sell more $2 bills. Okay, I don't have a term for term and condition for the week. Well, I guess I do, but it'll come up in the big piece where we talk about fertility. Maybe this is also folded into my retcon in my term and condition that, you know, last week when we were talking about the long game, we had this, a small part of the discussion was about the Great Depression and what's going

• 10:33Speaker 02

  on right now in the economy and when do we have the type of upheaval that propels us to have big, bold policy. And I said that we kind of attribute the like the the Great Depression was a shock to our economy. So every time we have a shock to the economy, we kind of expect something big to happen afterwards, even though we've had 13 recessions since World War II.

• 10:55Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  If we fall into a recession now, it will be number 14. And I said that the bigger upheaval is going to come from demographics. So we want to talk about fertility. What is this big demographic shift? What does it mean? Is it really coming? And

• 11:09Robin Rauzi?

  Why are people, why are people worried?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:11Robin Rauzi?

  And what is it that they think the policy can do about it?

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Can policy change fertility? And I, you know, this show, we always say it's about one problem and solution at a time. Fertility is a topic I don't know if I thought we would ever talk about because it's, it's not clear the extent to which it's a problem or something that should be solved, given that it's the manifestation of individual choices of families and their

• 11:34Robin Rauzi?

  Millions of people.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Millions of people. Like, is that really a problem if they choose something that maybe the economy doesn't like? Is that something that we should solve? So I didn't, I didn't necessarily think that we were to talk about fertility on the show, but

• 11:46Robin Rauzi?

  So I read, I don't even know, I lost track of how many articles about the perceived problem of fertility and lower, lower birth rates. The actual annual reporting from the CDC came out yesterday, which we have decided we're not going to do really newsy things. And then the news just follows us.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Breaking her.

• 12:09Robin Rauzi?

  We'd already planned this episode, CDC. Okay. So birth rates were up 1% last year, but they are still near record lows. There were 3.6 million births in the United States last year that were at a rate of 1.6 births per woman. And in general, the thought is a population needs to be at 2.1 births per woman on average to be a steady population. And all of these articles say, not all of them, but many, that this is, quote, widely seen as a problem that could affect the number of workers. It is framed again and again as an economic problem. And I think that's why I felt like it was appropriate for us to maybe talk about a little bit on this show.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Because we need worker bots.

• 12:51Robin Rauzi?

  Because we need worker bots.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  We need little worker bots and their widgets.

• 12:54Robin Rauzi?

  The irony of doing this, you know, a few weeks after talking about how AI is going to cause mass joblessness.

• 13:01Robin Rauzi?

  Like, nobody knows anything, people, no one knows anything. Besides needing worker bots, can you talk about what you think about why people are worried about the birth rate economically? And do you think these are good reasons or not good reasons?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  It's hard to say. I mean, it's hard to say what's a good reason versus what's an excuse. The straightforward answer is that most economies' growth is on some level tethered to population, and that it's much more challenging to grow the size of your economy as the number of people in it are getting smaller. So a shrinking population typically does not support a growing economy. We mostly think that because a growing population supports a growing economy. And because GDP is really well predicted by the number of workers in it, every worker you add to the economy adds to the economy itself. Certainly, one problem is just this pure population. We'd like our population to keep going up because that's, it's a much-

• 13:55Robin Rauzi?

  Because that's, that's, that's easy economic-

• 13:56Speaker 02

  It's easy economic growth. The second reason is that is more of a balance issue of that if the relative number of young to old people, the relative number of workers to non-workers, if that gets too far out of balance, you start to put a ton of pressure on social welfare systems like the one in the United States that we have. The vast majority of money that we spend on social welfare goes to old people, and prime-age adults and children get comparatively much, much less. So, one, we want to grow the economy. That's easy to do with a growing population. Two, we want to have enough workers relative to non-workers, especially with the way that we've currently structured our social welfare system. And then there's a third one that's a little bit more nuanced, which is there's a reason

• 14:41Speaker 02

  why fertility goes down in recessions. It is, in some way, this is going to sound really bad, a performance measure of the US economy, of any economy, is that people have more children when they feel more confident about their economic position. And so a decline in fertility is, in some ways, reflecting a decline in economic security of young people.

• 15:05Robin Rauzi?

  I don't want to, I don't want to take this too far away from economics, but don't you think it's also that people just feel insecure about the world in general right now? I mean, the economy is not the only thing-

• 15:14Speaker 02

  No, it's not-

• 15:15Robin Rauzi?

  You know, I was reading this sort of in-depth survey that the Pew Research Center did on adults who don't have children. And so they divided the survey group into two groups of people over 50 who didn't have kids and people under 50 who didn't have kids and were also saying they were unlikely to have kids. Anyway, affording kids was a concern for like 12% of that older group, but like 36% of that 49 and under group. You know, that, the, the cost constraints on them was really top of mind. But of course, you know, much higher on the list of reasons is just their preference that they just don't want to have kids.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this gets into a, like, very hard to measure question of how many kids do people want? And does overall fertility in the US reflect a change in preferences or a change in circumstances?

• 16:10Robin Rauzi?

  Or a combination thereof.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, like, it's both.

• 16:13Robin Rauzi?

  It's definitely a combination.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, and of course, like, worth saying that every industrialized Western country and Eastern country, for that matter, are seeing declining fertility.

• 16:24Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  And some of it is much more dramatic than others.

• 16:29Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  So I think one of the biggest falls in fertility is South Korea.

• 16:32Robin Rauzi?

  Is Korea, yeah, for sure.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  It just fell off of a cliff. So I think there's two things we can talk about. We talk about preferences of US women and then constraints on US women. Like, how much have we changed how much we want to have kids in the US versus, you know, what are the barriers to it? Because I think the short version is that we have really, really good evidence that there is almost no change in people's preferences. How many kids do they want to have versus how many kids can they have? Is want and can, they're, they're two different kind of forces and they have two different kind of avenues for policy intervention. The want side, you know, the preferences is a little nuanced because we have really good evidence that preferences are totally immune to policy. Like, I can't write you

• 17:17Speaker 02

  a check or give you a medal or somehow buy you or bribe you into having children if you don't want them. But we also know that preferences towards fertility aren't fixed. They're not fixed across women. They're not fixed within women. Generations can have different fertility preferences than the ones that came before or after. And women's own preferences can change over time in both directions as they get older. So all of this makes it hard to measure and hard to change on the preferences side. But all of that said, when it does come to preferences, like the best assessment that I can make about the decline in fertility in the US is that it's occurring amongst millennial women. These are women that are not at the end of their childbearing years.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  They're more likely to say three is the ideal number of kids than your generation.

• 18:04Robin Rauzi?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  They're also pretty like...

• 18:07Robin Rauzi?

  I'm old.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  I was born in 1985. I turned 40 this year, so I am at like, I'm the elder millennial.

• 18:14Robin Rauzi?

  Right. I'm middle of the pack Gen Xer.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Middle of the pack Gen Xer. So, middle of the pack Gen Xers were more likely to say two kids. Millennials are more likely to say three.

• 18:23Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, yeah. And my friends who had three, I'll use the fact that I didn't have kids as an excuse to have that extra one. We were their slack.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Oh, God, we picked up one of yours. Yeah. Yeah. But that was like, that was much more of a cultural norm. Like, the preferences have shifted. But millennial women are marked by having what's called unmet fertility preferences, which is they are not having as many kids as they would like. That's a real marked US problem. Like, Germany's like, I just want one.

• 18:51Robin Rauzi?

  And they have one.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  And they have one, and they don't want more than one. The US has a lot of what we call unmet fertility expectations, and it's particular amongst my generation of women. And there is some movement on the don't want kids, never going to want to have kids.

• 19:06Robin Rauzi?

  What do you mean? What do you mean movement?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Like, if you ask a 20-year-old, how many kids do you want? And they say zero. And then you ask them 20 years later, same generation, how many kids do you want? Most of the time, the zero goes down.

• 19:19Robin Rauzi?

  I'm sorry, it goes down to negative zeros?

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Sorry. The shifts in preferences, some people who start out wanting kids will shift to not wanting to have kids. And some people who don't want kids, they'll shift to having children. And like, these, there's like some, there's something fixed about these expectations, but also something fluid. This is what makes it so hard to measure, because your circumstances change, and then you decide you don't, you don't want kids. It's very hard to change those preferences. I think, though, for our show, which is about economic policy, there is very little the government can do to convince you to have children, if you don't want them.

• 19:54Robin Rauzi?

  Going back to the, that survey of people over 50 who don't have kids, and why they didn't have kids, for a huge number of them who might have wanted children at some point, the answers are, it just didn't happen. I didn't meet the right person. So it seems to me that if family formation is the issue and I just didn't meet the right person is the problem, we need subsidized eHarmony accounts.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 20:20Robin Rauzi?

  And we need to make sure that their, their, their algorithms are actually not setting people up to meet people and break up and then come and use their service again.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, not, you don't meet the right person, you just don't get pregnant. It's a journey for most people and I think what policy can do to make a difference. So there, there are policies that will increase fertility, but the, but it's kind of like conditions have to be right. Policy can change constraints and costs. It really can't change preferences. In some ways, that makes the US really lucky because not only are we just more of a little bit of a like large family kind of preferred country, we have tons of cost constraints. And the way that we measure the cost constraints is most effectively measured if you ask people why they are, they are not having another child.

• 21:06Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, interesting.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  So someone who has no kids, talking about cost, it doesn't get at much of the actual barriers of asking someone who has a kid, why aren't you having number two? Or why aren't you having number three?

• 21:20Robin Rauzi?

  Having number three.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  And if you're not having number two and number three, you are very likely to say that it's cost. And the New York Times did a poll about this where it asked people who had at least one children, why are you not having another kid? And it let them write in whatever they want. And 64% of people said childcare.

• 21:36Robin Rauzi?

  Really? Wow.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Yes. Because it's a crushing cost.

• 21:40Robin Rauzi?

  Because it's so expensive.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  It's a crushing cost.

• 21:42Robin Rauzi?

  And even before it got crushing, I certainly have, have friends who did the math and said they dropped out of the workforce.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the childcare cost is one. The cost to your job and your wages is another one. A lot of women see their earnings, I mean statistically, about half, if not two thirds of the gender pay gap is in fact just the motherhood penalty. Once you have kids, you'll see a permanent reduction to your lifetime earnings of around 20%. Some of that comes from you pulling back from work. Some of that comes from your employer rewarding you less or you not being able to work to the same degree or being discriminated against.

• 22:18Robin Rauzi?

  And not getting a promotion.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Not getting a promotion.

• 22:20Robin Rauzi?

  As soon as you might have.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or like you had a job that the promotion was you had to travel two days a week and you couldn't take it. You know, some, one person in the household, someone has to take care of the kids. Like, even if you have daycare, someone has to pick up the kids from school and drop off the kids from school, and that can be really constraining to the type of work that you can do, because so much of, especially high-income work, takes place with an after-hours or weekends expectation. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of women, like, they make this assessment that, like, the cost of another kid is just too high.

• 22:50Robin Rauzi?

  And, you know, before you have kids, you, nobody knows how much childcare costs.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  No, yeah, that's why the-

• 22:54Robin Rauzi?

  You just, you should have to, like, sign, you know, something that says, "I understand the cost of childcare."

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:00Robin Rauzi?

  But you shouldn't, we wouldn't have any children.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  We wouldn't have any children. No, if people knew how much childcare costs, I'm, like, kind of tempted to tell you how much I pay for childcare, but I'm also, like, but I don't want people out there to grow frustrated that they can't have kids, but, but, I mean, it's, it's also, like, we have a health insurance system that allows out-of-pocket costs for both, all of your prenatal visits, where you have to pay, what, 50 bucks a pop to go in for a prenatal visit? You also have labor and delivery out-of-pocket expenses, and it's more if it's a C-section.

• 23:29Robin Rauzi?

  Things you don't know.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Even for people who have large employer-sponsored plans, right? So, this is supposed to be the gold standard of health insurance in the United States. The average out-of-pocket cost for labor and delivery is $3,000 to $5,000.

• 23:41Robin Rauzi?

  Again, things that I think that we could do that are more serious than, you know, eharmony.gov. One of them is improving the number of obstetricians and gynecologists. I mean, those, the numbers of those doctors are falling off the map. There, one in three counties in, in the United States has no hospital-based obstetrics service. One in 10 mothers live in one of those counties. We're not taking care of mothers at all. You know, maternity death rates are high, higher in the United States, and they possibly should be.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, so, okay, again, data matters. We measure maternal mortality different than other places, though. So, it is worth saying-

• 24:18Robin Rauzi?

  It's true, it's like a year-

• 24:19Speaker 02

  We, it is a much more encompassing definition.

• 24:22Robin Rauzi?

  It's a much bigger window.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  We, we measure maternal mortality as basically anything that kills a woman within a year of childbirth. And in other countries, it's a tighter band, and it's something directly related to either pregnancy or labor and delivery. So, I would say our measure is much better. They, I'm not, this is gonna, let's take this out of context, their mortality should be higher.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Our measure is better. It's going up, but the big spike-

• 24:51Robin Rauzi?

  But it'll stop going up because we're going to stop measuring it. We're going to stop counting.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, they stopped it in Texas.

• 24:57Robin Rauzi?

  They stopped it in Idaho.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  So it's, this is like by far the most Orwellian part of the Trump agenda is like you have a high maternal mortality rate, you have a high cost of birth, you don't have good labor and delivery care in the US, and we don't have paid family leave and we don't have childcare. The good news is, again, the good news is, we know exactly how to fix all of these problems. You can't make people have more kids, but you can reduce the cost of kids dramatically. Free childcare and paid family leave for everyone, that's, those are, that's easy. Of the policies that every country in the Western world has tested to try and increase fertility, childcare moves the needle the most.

• 25:42Robin Rauzi?

  You know, that's fascinating because of course, the people on the right say it doesn't, it doesn't make a difference.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  No, it makes the biggest difference. It's the most effective policy for increasing the number of children is childcare. Free childcare.

• 25:53Robin Rauzi?

  Interesting.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's more than paid family leave, but of course, it lasts longer and it's a bigger cost. And it keeps women in their job, so their family can have more income. And then when you don't have to pay for childcare, your family's a lot richer.

• 26:05Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. Again, we haven't spelled out how much childcare costs, but in the daycare that was in my building, I believe it was over $700 a month per child.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  That's it? That's it? $700 a month? What do you have to do to get inside? Sleep with somebody? Come on.

• 26:22Robin Rauzi?

  You have to, you have to move to Spokane.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:25Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  I will say that I pay two grand a month per kid. This was not our first daycare. Our first daycare was $2,600 a month. And it was like, and we were like, oh God, okay, we'll stay here as short amount of time as possible until the cheaper one opened up. And we were, and then COVID hit, so then we had, we didn't have care for a year. But yeah, so we, we are $2,000 per month per kid.

• 26:53Robin Rauzi?

  Ouch.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  And I have two kids. Yeah, so you're doing the math in your head and you're like, wow, that's $24,000 a year per kid and you have to pay for that for four and a half years.

• 27:04Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  So over 100 grand for childcare per kid.

• 27:08Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, you do always hear those things about preschool costing more than college.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  So if you want to put two kids in childcare, that costs more than the average mortgage in 49 states and it costs more than public school, college tuition, like 43 or 44 states. Childcare is more expensive than housing or college. It's worth knowing that like, policy can make a difference for American families who feel like the economy is not supportive for their family goals and we are slowly turning family into a luxury. And you hear this casually, the way that people will say, don't have kids you can't afford.

• 27:48Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, yeah, you hear it all the time.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  All the time, don't have kids you can't afford. It's not my job.

• 27:51Robin Rauzi?

  And you hear it on both, I just would say it's, and you hear it both on the left and the right, that's a common dismissal of...

• 27:57Speaker 02

  It's not my job to pay for somebody else's kids. Don't have kids you can't afford.

• 28:01Robin Rauzi?

  And it's also used to be, you know, I shouldn't have to pay for their school, you know, I shouldn't have to pay, you know.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:07Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, I... Do you want your little worker bots for your business?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you want your little...

• 28:11Robin Rauzi?

  Your small...

• 28:12Speaker 02

  I mean, I've talked about this before, that I, you know, the idea that you shouldn't pay for someone else's kids is the most short-sighted thing. Someone paid for you.

• 28:21Robin Rauzi?

  You can't see, you can't hear me roll my eyes, but if you could, it went...

• 28:24Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, I mean, somebody paid for you and you're not paying for someone else's kids. I mean, you could look at it a couple of ways. You could say like, okay, you know, where do you think your doctor came from? That's somebody else's kid right there.

• 28:37Robin Rauzi?

  Exactly.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  You know, what about your lawyer, your accountant, your, you know, your anybody, like your employer? These are all somebody else's kids and like, you put in your dollar, your how much money to pay for somebody else's children because children are the future. Sorry. And then I'll say like, well, you know, someone paid for you. And then this one, this is actually my favorite. I said this to someone and I was like, you know, someone paid for you. You know, isn't this kind of giving it back? It's just paying for somebody else. And he's like, well, they get more today. And I'm like, well, God forbid, we evolve as

• 29:09Robin Rauzi?

  And probably actually not.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. God forbid, we evolve as a country and give children the best possible. Let's give them only what you got, guy who's 55 years old. Like, you set the limit. Nobody gets to have more than you ever in the United States of America.

• 29:23Robin Rauzi?

  Hey, I turned out okay. I'm 55. I turned out all right.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, like, children are a privilege. That's a choice. We have made children a privilege. We have demonized people who can't afford children. That is also a choice. So if we wanted to choose differently, we could, and we could really help people.

• 29:40Robin Rauzi?

  But we can also demonize people who don't have children. I mean, like,

• 29:43Speaker 02

  No win.

• 29:43Robin Rauzi?

  Like, there's no winning.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Just be rich and hetero and have lots of children. And that is the policy solution here on Optimistic Economy. So I will say, just like, very quickly, on the maternal side of health, there's also really good solutions for that that we don't have in place. And one of them is that the US should have more birthing centers, which are community health clinics that are just for labor or delivery prenatal and postnatal coverage. So they're not hospitals. They're, they're community health clinics for labor and delivery.

• 30:18Robin Rauzi?

  Specifically for, yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  And they would be really popular. A lot of women don't like going into hospitals for labor and delivery. And a lot of hospitals aren't good at labor and delivery. Even if they're a good hospital, like, they don't, believe it or not, a lot of hospitals can be good at some things and bad at others. And it's, you know, you would just be perfectly focused on labor and delivery. That would help a lot. No out-of-pocket cost would help a lot. And then there's things that have, like, innovations that we do on a small scale for some poor people that would really help. So one of them is a visiting nurse program. You know, basically, you go home with the kid. A nurse comes by once or twice a week for three or four weeks, checks on you, checks on the baby, takes your blood pressure, makes sure you're healthy. Like, that can help a lot.

• 30:57Robin Rauzi?

  Basic stuff.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Basic stuff.

• 30:59Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  You know, someone in the room who's not, like, frighteningly sleep deprived, doing a wellness check. Great idea.

• 31:05Robin Rauzi?

  Good idea.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  You know, so we have, we have really good solutions for some of the tangible problems with, you know, fertility slash motherhood slash childbirth in the US. They just, they just need leadership. And I guess this is, oh, man, this is what makes that article in the New York Times so frustrating, because like, whoo, it burned its way across the internet, and I think burned is the right word.

• 31:31Robin Rauzi?

  Trump wants a baby boom.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Trump wants a baby boom. I mean, like, I wanted to, I wanted to burn, I wanted to go out and buy a copy of the New York Times to burn it after I read the article.

• 31:39Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I read a bunch of copies of different stories, and they were all just equally horrifying.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:45Robin Rauzi?

  On every platform.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Every platform. But the, I think what was so just infuriating and even offensive about it was that it was full of the most ridiculous policy, like, medals for moms who have lots of kids, or full brides for only married people, because it's like, there's 5 million of those. I mean.

• 32:03Robin Rauzi?

  No, there's like, what, 2,800 of those?

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:06Robin Rauzi?

  It's totally nuts.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:07Robin Rauzi?

  That's going to solve our fertility crisis.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Or the, the, the $5,000 when you have a kid, which I, I did hear someone call cash on delivery, which.

• 32:17Robin Rauzi?

  [laughing]

• 32:18Speaker 02

  That was really good. You know, but it's, I guess, I guess, yeah, it's laughable, but that's the thing, it's laughable, like.

• 32:26Robin Rauzi?

  Like $5,000.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Like $5,000. But this is what grasping at straws looks like. It would be a genuinely depressing situation if this, in fact, represented some kind of fertility brain trust. Like, if they were genuinely like, this is all we know how to do, and it's like.

• 32:42Robin Rauzi?

  This is it.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  It's, you know, last gasp, but, but they're grasping at straws because they are avoiding the reality and the evidence and the policy that we, that we know will work. I think my comment last week about the long game is that we will get there, because fertility is not where people want it to be, although.

• 33:00Robin Rauzi?

  Can I?

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Some people would say fertility is fine, but.

• 33:03Robin Rauzi?

  You, I'm sorry, do you think fertility's fine?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Well, well, well, well. So there's lots of ways that we measure fertility, specifically the age-specific fertility rate, the total fertility rate, the general fertility rate, and the completed fertility rate. And they all measure different things and they have relative weaknesses. What we've learned, for example, from the age-specific fertility rate, which is the number of births per 1,000 of cohorts of women, what we've learned from that is that the biggest decline in fertility that the US saw was 40 or 50 years ago, and it was because the teen birth rate collapsed, which most people would regard

• 33:44Robin Rauzi?

  And that's still true.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  would regard as a really good thing. We actually had a very successful reduction in teen pregnancy that we saw after, that was in the, like, spanning the 60s to the 80s. And now we're seeing...

• 34:00Robin Rauzi?

  But we're seeing now in the 20s that those numbers have really dropped.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Twenty to 24 has dropped, 25 to 29

• 34:07Robin Rauzi?

  To 29 has dropped, though not as much.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Thirty to 34 is stable, 35 to 39, and 40 to 44 are both rising. So it's delayed.

• 34:17Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. I'm just going to put these, because I wrote these numbers down because I thought they were pretty, I mean, the 20 to 24-year-old cohort in 2007 was having 106.3 births per 1,000 women?

• 34:30Speaker 02

  It's per 1,000.

• 34:31Robin Rauzi?

  Per 1,001 population, right? But by 2024, that number was 56.7. And the next group up, 25 to 29, it was 117.5, and now it's 91.4. So part of one of the reasons I think that people are talking about IVF so much in the context of this question is the feeling that women in their 30s and 40s, when fertility gets harder, are going to have to, if they really do want to have two, let alone three children, they're going to have to make it up, and a lot of them are going to need fertility help and fertility treatment.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so let's have better birthing centers. Don't tax labor and delivery with health insurance costs. If women need IVF to get pregnant, you should make it required to be covered by health insurance at the very least. And then on top of all that, let's all make sure we have paid family leave and childcare. I mean, you can't really say that the US has a fertility crisis until it's done those five things.

• 35:21Robin Rauzi?

  Right. Right now, it's got, it's actually got deliberate constraints on fertility.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  It has a birth tax. It has, it has a infertility tax. It has a risk to labor and delivery and it has a huge toddler tax through childcare. I will say that the, the rate that you look at when people say it's 1.6 or 1.4, that's called the total fertility rate. And what it does is that it takes every age group. It's a composite projection. Like, it's taking 20 years, you know, women can have children from basically 15 to 45 to some degree. And it's taking the fertility rates of each of those groups within and kind of like collapsing them into a single number. So what it misses is changes in the timing of fertility. So the total fertility rate would collapse if

• 36:08Speaker 02

  you did not take into account that women were having babies at later ages. And so a lot of demographers will tell you that this 1.6 number, 1.5, it's too low because it hasn't taken into account that some of these women will continue to have children.

• 36:23Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  And it's imposing like the past onto the present when really fertility will be known in the future. The completed fertility rate is the number of kids women have basically by the time they turn 44. And so, once you get to the 40 to 44 age group, you take every woman who's 40 to 44 and the total number of kids that all those women have, and you put it in terms of a per 1,000 rate, that number hasn't fallen. It actually, I, it hasn't fallen.

• 36:53Robin Rauzi?

  Really?

• 36:53Speaker 02

  No, it hasn't fallen in, let's see. So it started to fall from like 3,000 to 2,000. And it got to 2,000 by like 1992.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  And it has been at about 2,000 ever since. So we have this fertility crisis, but the fertility crisis is coming off of the total fertility rate, which is a composite projection. There's been declines in the general fertility rate of the births, which is the fourth way to measure it, which is the births of just like everybody who's 15 to 45, the number of kids they had last year. That has also fallen, but we have not seen it in completed fertility. So I actually, we should have some kind of drinking game related to the number of times I bring up that I testified in front of Congress. I testified in front of Congress, in front of the Joint Economic Committee about this. And it was called demographic drivers of the deficit. And I pointed out to them that there hasn't been a decline in the number of kids that women want to have.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  There's been a decline in the number of kids that they are successful in having. And we still have a completed fertility rate that is stable, which means you have the conditions to boost fertility if you wanted to. You just would need to focus on the 30 to 40-year-old population. Mid-career women, they don't want to lose their jobs, they can't afford childcare, and they might need help with IDF. Like, that is how you would want to target them. And I said that to Congress. And then we talked for almost two hours about social security. So I was, I want to tell you guys right now, I was unsuccessful in telling this to Congress. And given this conversation, I mean, I hope I've been successful with you. I guess it's not over-

• 38:32Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, we should have gotten to that an hour ago, though, I feel like.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  That's, I mean-

• 38:36Robin Rauzi?

  It's because everything takes an hour.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Takes an hour. But I guess it's just, there are really good things that we can do, and it's less about juicing fertility and more about helping people who are not able to achieve something that they want.

• 38:50Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. It's not about trying to get people who don't want to have kids, it's not trying to make them want to have kids by parading cute toddlers around in the Oval Office.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Right. It's not about that, no. Honestly, if I, if I was on the fence about having kids and that happened, I'd be like, "Hey, out of spite, none."

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Don't try to play those games on me. But you know, I'm, I'm one of those people who can tell you that because I have the privilege of being rich, that I was able to have a family, even though I waited until I was 30 to start, to try to start getting pregnant. I was completely unsuccessful. I have two beautiful IVF children. They cost me a fortune.

• 39:34Robin Rauzi?

  Before you even got into childcare.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  I had to buy those children through infertility treatments. And then I had to pay for their childcare. And I, you know, this is something I get to do because I'm a rich woman. And I think it just breaks my heart and makes me so mad to think about the women who don't have the income that I do, who didn't have the privilege that I do, who don't get to have the same ending of the story. And, you know, and then you're like maternity medals. And I'm like, how fucking dare you treat people in this country like that? I just, it makes me like, I think I just, this is a good time to confess, as any, that I'm not always a cold-blooded economist.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  And then I am sometimes a human woman, and in this case, mother. And it just, it, if you don't want kids, you don't want kids. But if you want them and can't have them, man, should your government do better by you than to treat you with such insult as to say you need a $5,000 check?

• 40:40Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  So I'm just now reading in my show notes that the name of the show is Optimistic Economy. So we've got to really turn it around here, Robin. We've got to really turn it around.

• 40:50Robin Rauzi?

  You know, actually, okay, there, there are a couple of things that I think actually I find optimistic in this conversation that country might be having, even if it's not always at the level we wish they were having it. But one is that I do think that this is a place where Americans can find some common ground. And I also think that you make good points that, that we know where, in fact, the crux of this problem is, the cohort of women. And if we act now to do some of the things that we need to, to make it easier for them, then we, we could make it easier for those women to have families.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  And I think that this is why, that it's going to be the demographics that force Congress's hand, right? Like, we're running out of little worker bots, we're, we're running out of worker bots in training. And if you were to line up what Americans need... To no longer make having a child a privilege, it's a pretty damn good new deal. I mean, because if you were like, all right, let's do the family bill. Let's call it the family bill. The family bill of like what we need to make sure that people have children and parents aren't punished in the economy. The family bill is strictly controlled out of pocket cost for labor and delivery, meaning that there's zero. More support for soon to be in new moms and birthing centers across the US.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  It would mean paid sick days. It would mean paid family leave. It would mean free childcare. And it would mean free food at school. That would be the largest investment in children the United States has ever made. And it would take the next largest investment and just knock it out of the water by a factor of 10. We've never made it. And I think that this is the big change that's coming. And I say this every time I talk about childcare. We are going to have childcare within the decade. Because they can't fight it any longer because of these, you know. These other economic forces. Yeah, you're seeing them go through this like little dance of like, how do we get people to have kids? And they can't even talk about the evidence that is right in front of them if we know exactly how to support this. So this is why I think the demographics are going to be the Great Depression of our era. Not that it's like something that's so horrible.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  It's just, it's the big factor that forces their hand, that makes them do things that they were really dragging ass on. And like the long game of all the work we've done in every state that had sick days and every state that has family leave and every country that passed childcare, every free preschool in the United States. We have been building the evidence for decades about how to do better by children and families. Congress has not gotten there yet, but they cannot hold back the tide. So this is coming. Like this is, this is coming and it's going to be good. And I'm in full faith that that is going to happen. And if I need to go burn the New York Times in effigy a few times before that's a habit, y'all, that's just part of the process. Y'all, burning newspaper articles that make you angry. Like, that's how we do it.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  That is the long game. But the long game is, the long game breaks our way. It absolutely breaks our way this time. So that is why I'm very confident.

• 43:51Robin Rauzi?

  The arc of the moral universe is long. It breaks towards Catherine burning newspaper articles.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Oh, man. All right.

• 43:59Robin Rauzi?

  I think that was a good conversation. And, you know, and I know you've written pieces of this over the time, but I, you know, I think there's a lot of really good material there.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Don't forget the cha-ching I testified in front of Congress about it, Robin.

• 44:14Robin Rauzi?

  I know. I was trying to figure out if there's something I can mention every time, you know? I think it's, I think it's you testified in front of Congress and I used to work in newspapers. Actual print newspapers.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a great T-shirt. Actual print newspapers.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  I mean, can you imagine how impossible I'm going to be to talk to in like 20 years? Like, what if I testify again? I won't have a single friend left in this world. They'll be like, we get it, Catherine. We're ready to move on. She is not. This is a high watermark and she's just living in it. So we can have some kind of like cha-ching, cha-ching. Or like some kind of rationing. Like if I start to say, when I testified, you just have a buzzer that's like, brrrr. Sorry.

• 44:51Robin Rauzi?

  I'm going to pull my ear, tug my ear, give you a little sign.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  I think, I think with, with that.

• 44:57Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, good. By the way, the leaf blower is outside my window.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Ah. I mean, I think that's time for executive orders.

• 45:04Robin Rauzi?

  I think it is.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  What are your executive orders for the week?

• 45:09Robin Rauzi?

  I only have one, but actually, and I'm feeling pretty good about it. While I am in general, a free speech and freedom of the press person. So this is really more of like a style guide issue. Like if I had the style guide, if I got to dictate the style guide for the United States, I would say we have to stop referring to states as red states and blue states.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 45:28Robin Rauzi?

  I think it's bad. I think it's bad for our democracy. I think it's bad for pretty much everything.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  I cannot agree with you more. I am from, as we talked about at length before we started recording, the great state of Texas. And I'm moving back to the great state of Texas. And I think. The most liberal people would tell you that they have an open mind and that they're not judgmental and that they're accepting of other people. But I've been in professional settings. We're in suits. It's a meeting and I'll say I'm moving to Texas and someone will be like, "Oh, God. Why?" And I think that most people who are very satisfied with how good and liberal they are do not realize how criminally judgmental they are from people who come from states

• 46:15Speaker 02

  that they decide don't agree with them politically. And I actually did snap. I mentioned this at a work thing. I mean, I'm in a professional setting, so I don't think I should be held accountable for this, but this woman was like, I was like, "Yeah, I'm moving to Houston." And she was like, "Oh, my God. So are you, is it like, like what's happening? Like, how, like, why are you going?" And I was like, "I think I'm going because I just want to mention my home city without someone reacting like that." And she looked at me cold and I was like, "It's just like, I've lived abroad for a long time and I just, you know, people hate Texas and they love judging people from Texas and they love judging places that don't agree with them politically and so I just don't want to do it anymore. I just want to go home." And she was like, "Oh, I know it's so horrible when people do that."

• 46:58Speaker 02

  And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, it's one of the like, low-key nastiest you will see me in conversation is if you come down really judgmental on a place and I'll be like, "Well, let's make quick work of you because you do not insult a part of America in front of me and get away with it."

• 47:15Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, I do want to get back to the other, the other aspect of my executive order, though, which is I think that painting swaths of the country in colors, I mean, this isn't, this isn't college sports. This isn't intramural football. This is, you know, this is our country and we should not be writing off entire states and simplifying the politics and the culture and the needs of the people in those states by just going, "Well, that's, that's a blue state and that's their problem or a red state and that's their problem."

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Well, and also-

• 47:51Robin Rauzi?

  You know, it's, anyway.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Jesus, the difference between red states and blue states are cities. That is the only difference between a red state and a blue state is if it has a large city. And if it has a large enough city, it's a blue state. Looking at you, Illinois versus Indiana. They're so close, but one's a blue state because it has Chicago. And, you know, the South is more red because it doesn't have large enough populous cities. And I hate characterizing people like that. I hate that broad brush. So I'm in full endorsement of your executive order. Mine's gonna look very petty.

• 48:20Robin Rauzi?

  What's yours?

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Mine's gonna look very petty in comparison, but probably would get people angrier, which is I don't think we should have lawns anymore.

• 48:28Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, no, I don't have a lawn. I'm totally, totally down.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, but people feel very proprietary over having a lawn. And they're such a waste of space and we could do so much better for the earth. And so I would have this like, it is unconstitutional to have it in HOA that you're required to have a lawn. And you're not, you're just, you're not allowed to have grass. You can put other green stuff down, but it can't be imported grass. And you have to have like, I would put nativity requirements on every brown space that like at least half to two thirds has to be.

• 48:58Robin Rauzi?

  Has to be native.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  Has to be a native plant. You know, you've got people who have.

• 49:01Robin Rauzi?

  The birds of paradise that took over Los Angeles for decades and decades.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:05Robin Rauzi?

  You were just a water hog.

• 49:06Speaker 02

  I'm like a true Lady Bird Johnson girly at heart. You know, no grass. You can put in a native grass, but you can't mow it. And you gotta have native plants and some wildflowers. And y'all are gonna see a bunch of creatures in your yard. It's gonna be great. So that is my executive order. No grass, just flowers.

• 49:24Robin Rauzi?

  Speaking of which, who's your spiritual sponsor this week?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Well, related, my spiritual sponsor this week is mulch. And if, if you are anyone who's played around in the dirt or have a garden, it is just like, there is nothing to compare to the pre-mulch, post-mulch garden view. Of like, it's like, it's like the kicking off of the spring season. The yard is kinda gray, like it's kinda messed up. And I'm gonna just like, it is a lipstick.

• 49:52Robin Rauzi?

  Throw some mulch on that.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  I'm throwing some mulch on that. It's gonna look so good. And then I just get excited about being in the garden for the rest of the year. And like, it looks amazing and it feels so good being in the dirt, like working with the earth. So my spiritual sponsor is mulch.

• 50:07Robin Rauzi?

  Love it. My spiritual sponsor this week is the avocados that we grow in our backyard. It's one of the reasons that I'm still in my starter home, because I cannot leave the avocado tree. We're getting a bumper crop this year. We pulled down about 50 avocados yesterday. We make friends all over the city because we can just hand them 10 avocados.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 50:29Robin Rauzi?

  They are, by the way, also the best avocados you've ever had. Kind of the way homegrown tomatoes are better than any store bought tomatoes. They're just amazing. Anyway.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  So I think we need to award a prize for the most California thing you've said in any episode is the bumper crop of avocados from your backyard. That is like, that is truly the most California thing you've ever done.

• 50:49Robin Rauzi?

  And this tree, by the way, just grew from an avocado that fell from my neighbor's tree. It's a hybrid Mexican Guatemalan and it is unbelievable, the avocados. We have the fattest squirrels in the city. I sometimes see, I mean, they look like

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Healthy.

• 51:05Robin Rauzi?

  They're huge because they eat nothing but acorns and avocados.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Well, they're on that high protein diet. I mean, they're just getting huge. They go to the gym.

• 51:13Robin Rauzi?

  It's very paleo.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Gym avocado acorn baby.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  I want to thank everybody for listening and tuning in for this episode of Optimist to Texas Economy.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  We need to thank two people before we leave. The first is our producer, Sophie, who makes us sound smart and keeps us calm.

• 51:37Robin Rauzi?

  And she's gonna have to cut this thing in half.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  She's gonna have to cut this. Jesus. And our second is our video editor and producer, Andy, who helps us broadcast what we do to the world beyond our current listeners. Without either of them, we would not be able to make or broadcast or advertise the show. And so we want to snap them both out.