Pronatalists push all manner of big-government schemes aimed at raising fertility rates. But could a more modest—and more market-oriented—policy prove better at boosting births? Research suggests that more remote work leads to larger families.

People who worked from home at least one day per week "had more biological children from 2021 to early 2025, and plan to have more children in the future, compared to observationally similar persons who do not" work from home, according to the August 2025 working paper, "Work from Home and Fertility." A team of researchers from Stanford University, Princeton University, and international institutes surveyed working arrangements, recent births, and future fertility intentions in 39 countries, including the United States, finding that women who worked from home at least once a week had an average of 0.039 more children than nonteleworking peers did since 2021.

"A similar result holds for American men," they found, though the association was not statistically significant for men in the multicountry sample. But in both the U.S. and other countries, male fertility was positively correlated with a spouse or partner's work-from-home status. And "when both partners [work from home] at least one day per week….total lifetime fertility
is greater by 0.2 children" in the global sample, compared with couples where neither partner works from home.

Researchers say working from home may make it easier to balance work and family, but note that "it's also plausible that parents with young children at home may select" work-from-home arrangements more often.

Self-selection seems less of a confounding factor when it comes to future fertility intentions. In both the U.S. and multicountry samples, and for both men and women, working from home at least one day per week increased their preferred number of kids. For women, having a partner who occasionally worked from home was also associated with a desire for more children.

In the United States, average total planned fertility—a combination of the number of children already born or gestating and how many future children are desired—went from 2.26 to 2.43 for women and 2.01 to 2.36 for men who personally worked from home at least one day per week, and 2.43 for women and 2.52 for men when both they and their partner did. In the multicountry sample, the average total planned fertility increased from 1.9 for women and 1.86 for men when neither partner worked from home to 2.27 and 2.46, respectively, when both partners did.

The coronavirus pandemic provided a natural test of whether working from home could lead to more births. In 2021, the U.S. fertility rate rose 1 percent, following a near-steady decline since the late 2000s and contradicting crisis-era birth trends. The U.S. fertility rate dropped steeply in 2020; it's hard to say whether the 2021 bump was due to working from home (or something else about pandemic arrangements) or was a natural rebound. But the fact that the bump was largest among college-educated women, who are more likely to have jobs that would have allowed working from home during the pandemic, lends credence to the theory that remote work played a role.

A study out of Norway published in the December 2025 edition of Labour Economics found the country saw "a significant and persistent" 10 percent increase in births beginning nine months after the first COVID-19 lockdowns started. These "fertility increases were concentrated among women in 'greedy jobs' with lower flexibility prior to lockdown," according to the paper. "The overall birth response was driven by women who retained their job during the lockdown period, consistent with changes in the nature of work (flexibility) being a key mechanism," rather than increased time due to job loss.

Researchers Bernt Bratsberg and Selma Walther say this is "evidence that [workplace] flexibility directly impacts fertility."

Post-COVID fertility rates continue to decline globally, despite cash incentives, mandatory maternity leave policies, and state-subsidized child care. "Until now, discussion of declining fertility has focused on policies such as maternity leave and childcare provision," note Bratsberg and Walther. "Flexibility at work," they say, "has the power to drive fertility decisions."

This aligns with previous research suggesting that typical
government enticements to boost birth rates fail because decisions about family size are complex, personal, and extend beyond purely financial factors. It also calls into question the wisdom of a professedly pronatalist presidential administration ordering all federal employees to return to the office, as President Donald Trump did in early 2025. Simplifying remote work for both public and private sector employees could be a quicker, cheaper path to more children.

The post Research Suggests People Who Work From Home Are Having More Babies appeared first on Reason.com.

It’s official. The word “sustainable” is gone from Tesla’s mission statement.

For over a decade, Tesla’s guiding star was arguably the most impactful corporate mission statement of the 21st century. But over the last few years, we have watched the company slowly drift away from its environmental roots.

Now, Elon Musk has confirmed the final step in that divorce, rebranding the company’s goal from “Sustainable Abundance” to simply “Amazing Abundance.”

Former Clayton County, Georgia, jailer Jabin Bethea pleaded guilty in federal court to violating a pretrial detainee's civil rights. While transferring detainees between housing units, Bethea argued with a man who cursed at him, then slammed the detainee's head into a wall, threw him on the floor, and ordered him to put his hands behind his back. Surveillance and body-camera footage show the detainee lying on the floor, obeying orders, yet Bethea tased him at least six times. Bethea is scheduled for sentencing in 2026.

The post Brickbat: Big Boss Man appeared first on Reason.com.

Whenever I tell people I’m getting back into tapes, their faces immediately light up.

There’s a genuine excitement in peoples’ expressions these days when I mention physical media. Lately I’ve been talking about the cheap walkman I bought on a recent trip to Tokyo, and the various little shops where I hunted for music on cassettes. Unlike in Europe and the US, physical media never went out of vogue in Japan, and many people still have a strong preference for shopping in-person. This made Tokyo the ideal place to rediscover my love of portable analog music.

I searched through racks of tapes stacked on top of an old piano in a back-alley store on the edge of Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood known for thrifted fashion and oddball record shops. On recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend, I checked out a specialist shop on a sleepy street in Nakameguro, where cassettes easily outnumbered vinyl records 10-to-1. Almost always, I steered myself toward local artists whose names I didn’t recognize. Sometimes, I bought tapes based on the cover art or description alone. Most second-hand music stores in Tokyo keep everything sealed in plastic, so you either have to bother the shopkeep, or just trust your gut and take a chance.

This kind of music discovery delights people when I describe it to them. Sometimes they start telling me about rediscovering their old CD collection, or wanting to track down an old iPod Classic to experience their music library away from the surveillance and excess of big tech platforms. Maybe it’s just because I live in a particular social bubble in a particular countercultural pocket of New York City. But recently, the conversations I’ve had on this topic have got me feeling like the culture of music is shifting.

People are leaving Spotify, and those who aren’t seem embarrassed about using it. Major artists pulled their music off the platform this year in protest of the company’s ICE recruitment ads and connections to military drones, and posting your Wrapped stats has gone from a ubiquitous year-end pastime to a cultural faux pas. Many folks are sick of streaming in general. They’re sick of giant corporations, algorithmic playlists, and an internet infested with AI slop. Artists are tired of tech platforms that pay them virtually nothing, owned by degenerate billionaires that see all human creativity as interchangeable aesthetic wallpaper, valued only for its ability to make numbers go up. Everywhere I go, people are exhausted by the never-ending scroll, desperately wanting to reconnect with something real.

My own path to re-embracing physical media unfolded in stages. Last year, I canceled my Apple Music subscription and started exclusively listening to music I bought from artists on Bandcamp. I still have a large mp3 library, and I thought about setting up a self-hosted media server to stream everything to my phone. But ultimately, I got lazy and wound up just listening to albums I downloaded from the Bandcamp app. Then I ran out of storage on my phone, and the amount of music I had available on-the-go shrank even more.

When I came to Tokyo, a friend took me to a store that sold cheap portable cassette players, and I knew it wouldn’t be a huge leap to take my music listening fully offline. The walkman I bought is unbranded and has a transparent plastic shell, allowing you to watch all the little mechanical gears turning inside as the tape spools around the wheels and past the playheads. It was one of the easiest purchasing decisions I’ve made in recent memory: After years of psychic damage from social media and other phone-based distractions, I was ready to once again have a dedicated device that does nothing but play music.

There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids’ Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather.” Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit “skip.” Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.

Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification — with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits.

Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call “user friction,” turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes “Content,” flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by “perfect fit” algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized “vibes.”

What we now call “AI Slop” is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses — a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, we’re simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class.

On one hand, I empathize with those who still feel like they get something out of streaming. Having access to so much music can feel empowering, especially when so many people feel like they lack the time and resources to develop a music-listening practice. “What streaming service should I use instead of Spotify?” is a question I’ve been seeing constantly over the past few months. 

Here’s my contrarian answer: What if there’s no ethical way to have unlimited access to every book, film, and record ever created? And moreover, what if that’s not something we should want?

What if we simply decided to consume less media, allowing us to have a deeper appreciation for the art we choose to spend our time with? What if, instead of having an on-demand consumer mindset that requires us to systematically strip art of all its human context, we developed better relationships with creators and built new structures to support them? What if we developed a politics of refusal — the ability to say enough is enough — and recognized that we aren’t powerless to the whims of rich tech CEOs who force this dystopian garbage down our throats while claiming it’s “inevitable?”

Tapes and other physical media aren’t a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals.

More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.