Half a century before Don Draper (Jon Hamm) became a figurehead of sartorial prowess, Bewitched brought magic and ad man style into America's living rooms. Sitcoms have long been a barometer for comedy trends and reflect changing fashions. An outfit can be timeless, and so can a show that makes you laugh—ditto how quips and clothing become outdated and stale. 

Of course, some aspects of costume design on TV's funniest shows are in on the joke, whether emphasizing differences or calling specific details to attention. Making you laugh and getting clothing inspiration are not mutually exclusive. Because most sitcoms are current to their era, this genre gives a strong sense of how people dress, including where garments are sourced and how the contemporary costume designer role has evolved. Costumers (which is different from costume designers) who shopped and rented rather than designed and built pieces are credited for most of the pre-90s entries.  

Social media provides a hotspot of reappraisal "every outfit" accounts for new and old fans alike to muse over characters like Seinfeld's George Costanza (Jason Alexander), who has become a style icon in his own right—as has co-creator Larry David. Don't just take our word for it, as The A.V. Club has called on an expert to get into the finer details of 20th-century menswear on shows like I Love Lucy, The Bob Newhart Show, Family Ties, and yes, Seinfeld.  

"I think George Costanza is super stylish. The caveat is that I was young when that show was on, so I don't remember him as being seen as stylish. It's just that, in hindsight, when I look at him, I’m like, 'Oh, he’s really stylish," says Derek Guy. Taking a break from writing about the current political sartorial scene, Guy (aka X's "menswear guy") hopped on the phone to travel back in time to chat about some of sitcom TV's most beloved characters. The California-based founder of the blog Die, Workwear! and editor at Put This On has over a million followers on X, where amid the lessons in tailoring history and hilarious retorts, the writer occasionally references TV characters like George, Frasier Crane, and Tony Soprano. 

Taking into account that there are over 1700 episodes of the nine shows we discussed with Guy, this snapshot is still incredibly revealing about the cuts and silhouettes and how they read to a 2024 eye. Not only that, but these sitcoms highlight trends, what was considered elite dressing, and why some powerful political figures could take a page out of these characters' style books.  

Join us from the '50s to the late '90s as we discuss I Love Lucy, The Bob Newhart Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Seinfeld, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Frasier, and Friends.  

[jezebel_slideshow]

Karen Lewis, a therapist in Washington, D.C., talks with a lot of frustrated single people—and she likes to propose that they try a thought exercise.

Imagine you look into a crystal ball. You see that you’ll find your dream partner in, say, 10 years—but not before then. What would you do with that intervening time, freed of the onus to look for love?

I’d finally be able to relax, she often hears. I’d do all the things I’ve been waiting to do. One woman had always wanted a patterned dish set—the kind she’d put on her wedding registry, if that day ever came. So Lewis asked her, Why not just get it now? After their conversation, the woman told her friends and family: I want those dishes for my next birthday, damn it.

Lewis, who studied singlehood for years and is the author of With or Without a Man: Single Women Taking Control of Their Lives, doesn’t mean to suggest that anyone should give up on dating—just that they shouldn’t put their life on hold while they do it. That might be harder than it seems, though. Apps rule courtship culture. Finding someone demands swiping through sometimes thousands of options, messaging, arranging a meeting—and then doing it again, and again. That eats up time but also energy, motivation, optimism. Cameron Chapman, a 40-year-old in rural New England, told me that dating is the only thing she has found that gets harder with practice: Every false start leaves you with a little less faith that the next date might be different.

So some people simply … stop. Reporting this article, I spoke with six people who, like Chapman, made this choice. They still want a relationship—and they wouldn’t refuse if one unfolded naturally—but they’ve cycled between excitement and disappointment too many times to keep trying. Quitting dating means more than just deleting the apps, or no longer asking out acquaintances or friendly strangers. It means looking into Lewis’s crystal ball and imagining that it shows them that they’ll never find the relationship they’ve always wanted. Facing that possibility can be painful. But it can also be helpful, allowing people to mourn the future they once expected—and redefine, on their own terms, what a fulfilling life could look like.

Chapman didn’t used to hate dating. When she got back into it after her marriage ended, she had a philosophy: “There’s no such thing as a bad date. There’s just good dates and good brunch stories.” But she started to feel discouraged by how few options she had in her small town. Some people were there on vacation; others just weren’t a match. She stopped going on app dates in 2017 and got off of them completely about four years ago—until, in early 2023, she resolved to try them once more for at least a week. In that time, she told me, she swiped through hundreds of profiles and matched with two people. One, she found out, hadn’t disclosed that he was in a polyamorous relationship. “I was counting down the minutes to the end of that week,” she said. After that, she decided, “I don’t need any more brunch stories.”

In years past, before apps became the most common way to meet a partner, people tended to pair up with friends, acquaintances, or co-workers. The divide between dating and not dating wasn’t so stark. Now, though, searching can feel like an unrelenting obligation. Mai Dang, a 34-year-old program manager in Washington, D.C., told me she thinks often of one friend’s response when she said she wanted to eventually have a family: “Well, are you doing something about it?” Most of the books, podcasts, and influencers targeting single people address how to date better—more efficiently, more confidently, with more of an open mind. Few highlight that love takes luck, or that, as Lewis told me bluntly, there may not be someone out there for everyone.

[Read: Dear Therapist: It’s hard to accept being single]

Growing up, most of us know we may not snag our dream job or become famous. But a relationship, a family, a place to build a life together—many of us are raised to see these things as the building blocks of a meaningful existence. It can be hard to accept that they aren’t birthrights. Without them, you may feel frozen in place: like you’re waiting for something, for someone.

Lewis believes that prolonged and unwanted singlehood is a form of “ambiguous loss,” a term first coined by the University of Minnesota social scientist Pauline Boss in the 1970s. At first, Boss was writing about the psychological absence of a father. But this was during the Vietnam War, and it quickly became apparent that the phenomenon was spurred by physical absence too—as with the prisoners of war whose families didn’t know whether to grieve them or keep hoping for their return. When loss is ambiguous, closure is near impossible; it’s not clear whether there’s anyone to mourn. Perpetual singlehood doesn’t have the same gravity, but it can feel similarly unresolved. If you’ve long had an idea of a future partner, and that imagined person keeps not showing up, how do you know whether to keep hoping or to move on? “That hanging in the middle,” Lewis told me, “is a very, very uncomfortable place.”

For the people I spoke with, the lack of control over their romantic life was exasperating. They could decide to make friends, or move, or switch jobs—but they couldn’t will a partner into being. Quitting dating was a way to reconcile themselves to that fact. Jeffrey B. Jackson, a family therapist and a professor at Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life, reminded me about a prayer that’s a core part of Alcoholics Anonymous: The goal is to develop “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

That approach comes with risks. What if you miss the date that would’ve changed everything? (One person I talked with did find a relationship after she decided to delete her apps and freeze her eggs; her last app date was with her current partner.) Geoff MacDonald, a University of Toronto psychologist who studies singlehood, has found that when you ask people about their biggest dating regret, they talk about missed opportunities a lot more than rejection.

But with a laser focus on romance, you might pass up other possibilities. When Nicole Vélez Agosto, a 38-year-old psychologist in Texas, decided more than two years ago to stop dating, she felt freed of “the anxiety of Is he gonna call? or, you know, Does this person like me?” she told me. “When you get rid of that, you’re like, Oh, wow. Life is lighter.” With that mental burden lifted, the people I spoke with turned their attention elsewhere. “When I was married, my life became about my husband,” Chapman said. She didn’t even really know what her own interests were. But now that she’s single—and not dating—she’s been hiking and taking burlesque and belly-dance classes.

[Read: What we gain from a good-enough life]

MacDonald told me that when his research team surveyed participants on the best thing about being single, most said “the freedom.” The worst part, they said, was “the loneliness.” Yet the people I talked with seemed to feel less lonely when they weren’t dating—better able to appreciate their solitude and the bonds they already had. Chapman is freer to visit her aging mom, and she spent a lot of time with her father before he died a few months ago. And now that she’s not keeping herself available for romantic prospects, she’ll chat with anyone at the local bar. She’s made more new friends than she ever used to.

Counting out a partner might upend your whole life plan. But when you’re pushed to consider alternate directions, you might end up somewhere both imperfect and wonderful. Vélez Agosto adopted a girl whom she’s raising on her own; recently, when her daughter was in the hospital, two close friends showed up to help. Others told me they’d come to terms with not having the family they’d wanted and were pursuing new goals: making a career shift, writing a book, buying a home, surfing.  

Giving up dating brings good days and bad. You can’t just stop hoping for a partner on command, after all. In certain moments—on Valentine’s Day, or when something great happens and no one’s around to hear about it—you may be reminded: This isn’t what you would have chosen. Your loss is still ambiguous.

The drive for clarity is natural. “When things get tough, we often will try to simplify things,” Jackson told me. But he wants people who feel caught in the painful limbo of singlehood to ask themselves: “How could you, in the present, build the life that you want for yourself and continue searching for this person?” Maybe that means buying the patterned dishware and sending a DM while you’re at it; maybe it means signing up for an activity you’ll enjoy whether or not you meet someone cute; maybe it means taking a break from romance rather than walking away forever. In his clinical experience, Jackson finds that people tend to return to dating eventually anyway.

Marching on, after so many letdowns and embarrassments, is brave. But so is the decision to stop, a choice that American society too often doesn’t celebrate or even present as an option. It might seem extreme, but the people I spoke with had already tried to date and be fully present for other endeavors—and found it untenable. Refusing to continue isn’t a cop-out so much as an affirmation of everything else precious that fills one’s days. As Shani Silver, the host of the podcast A Single Serving, who quit dating in January 2019, told me: “If you were treating your life like a waiting period before you find love, you are missing your own life.”

Silver’s point reminded me of something I’d heard from Drew Clement, a 37-year-old in Ohio who told me that his “entire approach to life changed” when he quit dating. He used to attend concerts often, but he was always distracted by the possibility of romance—he’d make eye contact with someone in the crowd, then spend the rest of the show thinking about smiling their way or trying to get their number. But he doesn’t worry about that anymore. For the first time, he’s just watching the stage and listening to the music.

Eight years ago, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel was an outlier in liberal Silicon Valley for publicly supporting Donald Trump. But now a number of prominent male tech plutocrats who previously opposed the former president have done an about-face: These broligarchs are publicly endorsing and donating to the Republican candidate—and revealing a lot about their own priorities.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who according to his biographer once waited in line for six hours to shake Barack Obama’s hand, was planning to donate $45 million a month to a super PAC supporting Trump’s campaign. Musk later denied making the offer, but he reiterated his support for Trump, despite the former president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and his criticism of electric vehicles. After backing Joe Biden in 2020, Musk has grown sharply critical of Democrats on a range of issues.

Meanwhile, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who once blasted Trump’s anti-immigration politics, recently endorsed Trump on his podcast, arguing that the Republican nominee’s policies are better for tech start-ups. Another prominent venture capitalist, David Sacks, who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and said after the January 6 riot that Trump had “disqualified himself,” hosted a fundraiser for Trump in June, circulated a list of Silicon Valley luminaries supporting the ex-president, and urged others: “Come on in, the water’s warm.” Sacks maintained in an open letter that the Republican ex-president would be better on the economy, foreign policy, and border security.

Trump’s consistent lead in the polls, at least until President Joe Biden dropped out, might also help explain the broligarchs’ change of heart; many business leaders cozy up to politicians who seem likely to win. But another motivation seems obvious: a desire for power without accountability. Noblesse without the oblige.

Trump promises massive tax cuts and looser regulation. That’s good for the broligarchs’ pocketbooks. It’s also a stark contrast with the Biden administration’s stricter enforcement of antitrust laws, its crackdown on cryptocurrency scams, and its stunning turnaround of the IRS—which, after stepping up efforts to catch rich tax cheats, recently announced that it had recovered $1 billion in past-due taxes owed by “high-income, high-wealth individuals.” While tech libertarians were happy for Biden to bail out their failing finances—last year, his administration saved Silicon Valley Bank, and several broligarchs, by lifting the limit on federal insurance for deposits—they are not so keen on government when it constrains their ability to grow richer.

[Barton Gellman: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]

I am a sociologist who studies the ultrarich. Over the course of 17 years of research, I’ve heard repeatedly from financial advisers that multimillionaire and billionaire clients view themselves as above nationality and laws. One wealth adviser told me that some of his clients sincerely “believe that they are descended from the pharaohs, and that they were destined to inherit the earth.”

This mindset comes through in a 1997 book that Thiel has listed among his favorites of all time: The Sovereign Individual, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. The text unironically likens the ultrarich to “the gods in Greek myth,” and assures readers that they deserve no less than world domination: “Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies.” In describing why he included the book, Thiel said that it offered a “prophecy” of “a future that doesn’t include the powerful states that rule over us today.” Thiel has famously argued that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

To many billionaires’ dismay, democratic governance involves taxation, regulation, and scrutiny by the free press. The same system that facilitated their prosperity through the rule of law and good economic stewardship also constrains them—as it does all of us. But hell hath no fury like a broligarch who doesn’t get his way.

That’s how the rich really are different from you and me: Some of them, particularly Silicon Valley CEOs, see any form of democratic constraint on themselves as illegitimate by definition. Rather than participate in the compromise and turn-taking that are second nature in democratic societies, they say, “Don’t you know who I am?” Their sense of entitlement cannot be understated. For example, Musk allegedly soured on Biden when the latter didn’t invite him to a 2021 White House summit on electric vehicles; Musk publicly bemoaned the “cold shoulder” he received. His friend Jeff Skoll, the billionaire former eBay executive, went so far as to accuse Biden of “persecuting our entrepreneurs.” (Other billionaires have made even more absurd claims of victimhood: In 2014, the venture capitalist Tom Perkins likened media criticism of the Silicon Valley elite to Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against Germany’s Jewish population.)

But for all their rejection of taxation, regulation, and press scrutiny, the broligarchs are not anarchists. They’re in full support of laws protecting their property rights and enforcing their contracts. They use public goods such as potable water, well-maintained roads, and police protection. They’re just not keen on being subject to the law, doing their part to keep government up and running, or acknowledging their dependence on a free, functional democracy for their prosperity.

To counter Musk, Sacks, and other pro-Trump Silicon Valley figures, more than 100 venture capitalists announced Wednesday that they will support Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid for the White House. But even broligarchs who support Democrats seem to bristle at public oversight of the tech industry. The LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Biden donor who signed the “VCsForKamala” statement, has urged the vice president to dump Lina Khan, the Biden-appointed Federal Trade Commission chair who has argued for more aggressive antitrust enforcement on tech companies. Tech plutocrats of all ideological stripes try to bend the political system to their wishes. The author Michael Lewis told 60 Minutes that Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency tycoon who was convicted last year of defrauding customers of billions of dollars, considered paying Trump $5 billion to stay out of the 2024 presidential race.

Among the broligarchs’ defining traits is an undemocratic conviction, made explicit by some, that their ideas should prevail regardless of the preferences of their fellow citizens. “Competition is for losers,” the headline of a 2014 Thiel op-ed in The Wall Street Journal declared—a sentiment that extends to the competition of ideas and policies on which democracy depends.

[Ari Breland: Silicon Valley got their guy]

To some, the politics of the new pro-Trump broligarchs might seem shortsighted. But they do not rely on public schools, Medicare, Social Security, or other shared initiatives. If all of those institutions—created and maintained through representative democracy and the tax contributions of generations—disappeared tomorrow, the billionaires would be fine in the short term. In fact, they would be better off, because they could keep for themselves the relatively small share of their wealth they now pay via their taxes to support those institutions.

And if the nation becomes a crumbling ruin, with cratering health and education levels, or roads and bridges falling to pieces, then what of it? In the short term, broligarchs can adapt to local anarchy as the ultrarich of Brazil and Mexico have done, using helicopters to commute a few blocks to work or to ferry their children to school, high above the crime-ridden streets where their fellow citizens must struggle to survive as best they can. In the long term, when their adaptations cease to protect them, they can retreat to luxury underground bunkers—complete with bowling alleys!—or even to outer space. The ultimate displays of wealth and power are the space-travel projects that might someday allow Musk and other broligarchs not only to escape the laws of the state but also to escape the planet entirely. Slipping the surly bonds of society, they could leave the rest of us to maintain the democracies that brought them prosperity.

The facts of the so-called fertility crisis are well publicized: Birth rates in the United States have been trending down for nearly two decades, and other wealthy countries are experiencing the same. Among those proposing solutions to reverse the trend, the conventional wisdom goes that if only the government were to offer more financial support to parents, birth rates would start ticking up again.

But what if that wisdom is wrong?

In 1960, American women had on average 3.6 children; in 2023, the total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman expects to have in her lifetime) was 1.62, the lowest on record and well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Meanwhile, rates of childlessness are rising: In 2018, more than one in seven women aged 40 to 44 had no biological children, compared with one in 10 in 1976. And according to a new report from Pew Research Center, the share of American adults younger than 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have children rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, to 47 percent. In mainstream American discourse, explanations for these trends tend to focus on economic constraints: People are deciding not to have kids because of the high cost of child care, a lack of parental leave, and the wage penalty mothers face. Some policy makers (and concerned citizens) suggest that expensive government interventions could help change people’s minds.

But data from other parts of the world, including countries with generous family policies, suggest otherwise. Today, every OECD country except Israel has a below-replacement fertility rate, and the speed of the decline during the past decade has outpaced demographers’ expectations. In 2022, the average fertility rate of European Union countries was 1.46; in 2023, South Korea’s was 0.72, the lowest in the world.

South Korea has spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years on policies meant to boost fertility, including monthly stipends for parents, expanded parental leave, and subsidized prenatal care—yet its total fertility rate fell by 25 percent in that time. France spends a higher percentage of its GDP on family than any other OECD member country, but last year saw its lowest number of births since World War II. Even the Nordic countries, with their long-established welfare states, child-care guarantees, and policies of extended parental leave, are experiencing sharp fertility declines.

Policy shifts that make life easier and less expensive for parents are worthwhile in their own right. But so far, such improvements haven’t changed most countries’ low-fertility rates. This suggests the existence of another, under-discussed reason people aren’t having kids—one that, I have come to believe, has little to do with policy and everything to do with a deep but unquantifiable human need.

[Read: To have or not have children]

That need is for meaning. In trying to solve the fertility puzzle, thinkers have cited people’s concerns over finances, climate change, political instability, or even potential war. But in listening closely to people’s stories, I’ve detected a broader thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and a reason for being. Many in the current generation of young adults don’t seem totally convinced of their own purpose or the purpose of humanity at large, let alone that of a child. It may be that for many people, absent a clear sense of meaning, the perceived challenges of having children outweigh any subsidy the government might offer.

In his 1960s work on the economics of the family, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker theorized that household decisions, including fertility choices, could be analyzed through an economic lens. More specifically, children could be analogized to goods, like a house or a car; the number that parents had was related to what they could afford in terms of time and money. By this logic, making the goods less expensive—expanding household budgets via subsidies, return-to-career guarantees, and other financial carrots—should be enough to push parents to have more kids.

Governments have generally hewed to this assumption when launching pronatal policies. But two new books exploring why people do or don’t have children—works that take wildly different approaches to the question—suggest that this method is flawed.

[Read: Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?]

In Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, an economist and a Catholic mother of eight, compiles interviews with 55 women from across the United States who have five or more children—hers is a qualitative study of Americans happily breaking from the low-birth-rate norm. Connecting the author and her unusual subjects (only about 5 percent of U.S. mothers have five or more kids) is a shared certainty that children are an unqualified good, and that raising them is an activity freighted with positive meaning.

Then there are those who are much less sure. In What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, Anastasia Berg, an academic and editor at The Point, and Rachel Wiseman, an editor at the same magazine, engage literature, philosophy, and anti-natalist texts to wrestle with whether children are worth having at all. The decision is described as “paralyzing” and “anxiety-provoking,” to be approached with trepidation (even though the authors find individual clarity by the end). But their book echoes Pakaluk’s in one striking respect: Both works share the view that current political strategies for encouraging people to have children are lacking a crucial element. “As attractive as economics may be as a solution to the riddle of the growing ambivalence about having children, it is partial at best,” Berg and Wiseman write. Pakaluk observes, “Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, and for their future children.” In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children—not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.

In many quarters, that sort of certainty has become elusive. Indeed, Berg and Wiseman dwell on its opposite: anxiety about whether having children is good or whether it’s an imposition, a decision that might deprive a person of individual fulfillment or even make the world worse in the long run—by, for instance, contributing to climate change, overpopulation, or the continuation of regressive gender norms. “Becoming a parent,” they write, “can seem less like a transition and more like throwing yourself off a cliff.”

The authors touch on the standard narratives of why young people are delaying or forgoing children—financial anxiety, difficulty finding a partner, worries that having kids will be incompatible with their career—but these they describe as “externals,” borrowing a term from the family therapist and author Ann Davidman, not the core concern. One of their interviewees notes that if money were no object, she would be “at least neutral” on the subject of having a child, which is still some distance from positive. Instead, more existential worries emerge, pointing to a loss of stabilizing self-confidence among recent generations, or to the lack of an overarching framework (religious or otherwise) that might help guide people toward a “good” life. “The old frameworks, whatever they were, no longer seem to apply,” Berg and Wiseman write. “And the new ones provide us with hardly any answers at all.”

[Read: The two ways to raise a country’s birth rate]

The mothers whom Pakaluk profiles approach childbearing with far less ambiguity. As one told her, “I just have to trust that there’s a purpose to all of it.” Her interviewees’ lives are scaffolded by a sincere belief in providence, in which their religious faith often plays a major role. These mothers have confidence that their children can thrive without the finest things in life, that family members can help sustain one another, and that financial and other strains can be trusted to work themselves out. And although the obvious concerns are present—women describe worries about preserving their physical health, professional standing, and identity—they aren’t determinative. Ann, a mother of six, tells Pakaluk that she doesn’t feel “obliged” to have a large family but that she sees “additional children as a greater blessing than travel, than career … I hope we still get to do some of those things, but I think this is more important. Or a greater good.”

It’s a deceptively simple claim—and reinforces the notion that if people are going to have children, they need more than a hunch that human life is valuable. “It is not just the possibility of goodness but its actuality that fuels our deepest longing to ensure a human future,” Berg and Wiseman propose. And yet, we live in a time when even those who are certain about having kids are sometimes treated with skepticism. To proclaim that parenthood could be a positive experience is, in some circles, slightly gauche. “To assert the goodness of one’s own life,” the authors write, “is to risk coming across as privileged, or just hopelessly naive.”

Contrast that with the attitude of Hannah, a mother of seven who tells Pakaluk that each new child “brings benefit to the family and to the world.” She and the other mothers exemplify what happens when meaning is deeply internalized: Many children tend to result—and, according to these women, bring joy with them.

Of course, joy is a hard thing for any policy to promise. Government agencies rely on stats—income, years, “productivity”—to make the case for interventions, and tend to overlook the unmeasurable. Intangible incentives such as purpose, belonging, and love don’t always seem rational. As Robert F. Kennedy put it in a 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, delivered less than three months before he was assassinated: “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play … It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Kennedy was, essentially, urging Americans to pursue meaning, suggesting that only by doing so would they have the fortitude to fight despair. But “meaning” is not something governments can easily provide; it tends to stem from uniting in the face of undesirable crises (wars, pandemics) or from the sorts of broadly enforced norms (religious, cultural) that many no longer share. (This could be a clue as to why Israel has bucked the low-birth-rate trend: The religious edict to “be fruitful and multiply” is an accepted part of the national culture, and childbearing is viewed as a contribution to a collective goal.)

Politically, there’s very little upside—and often significant downside—in pointing to abstractions without easy solutions. If falling birth rates can be attributed to a loss of meaning, the question then becomes if there can be any government-based solution to fertility decline. People debating whether to have children seem to be seeking certainty that life is a good thing, that more life would thus be better, and that assistance, if needed, will arrive. Government policy can help with the last part. The first two assurances will most likely come only from another source.