Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

Most tech employment in Europe is via American FDI.

And for a large number of "European" companies it's the same management, board members, and investors as in the US. Heck, I'm on the board of a European company as well.

It's just that those people tend to be about 2 standard deviations out on whatever normal distribution you're dealing with.

Here in the US, you get a lot of these incel-y types with women control and breeding kinks.

But in China, it's more the very hardcore commies worried about the future of the party in 30 years and maybe have one chubby grandchild.

In Korea and Japan, you get a lot of Moonie types and that sort of folk.

In the Middle East (huge, I know), these are the hardcore Muslim folks but with a family bent (think strange uncles without children themselves).

South Americans here will be the turbo Catholic variety typically with a lot of kids already

Generally, the person that is in the pro-natalist camp is generally a person that is conservative in their social ideas. They want yesterday to be like to day, and today to be like tomorrow.

But, their individual ideologies and day-to-day-life are about as opposed to each other as can be and they may outright hate each other.

Marx would have a field day with these people.

There are tons of (valid) reasons for and against boosting birthrates, but you have to break it down to the actual reasons that people are "natalists" or not.

Throwing all (anti-)"natalists" into the same pot makes as much sense as labelling communists, fascists and anarchists "anti-capitalists" instead; yes your label technically applies, but the group it describes is so heterogenous that you can't meaningfully talk about it anyway.

Edit for failing to address your actual question: No and no (people are not anti-nativists by default and shouldn't be).

If "anti-nativist" means someone that wants to keep birthrates below 2/womanlife long-term, than this is basically advocating for suicide at a species-level, and "unhealthy" from an evolutionary point of view.

But is that actually what your "anti-natalist" believe? If people just live lifes that lead to <2 children/woman, but don't really care or consider the whole question, does that make them anti-natalists, too (I don't think so)?

That is an interesting point, and not obvious why it would be so. In fact, it kind of calls into question whether the whole relationship is causal. The people who were able to WFH longer were more often in high-income jobs (service workers never got to do it in the first place, it was almost entirely an office worker thing). They were thus more likely to be in an economic position where they felt comfortable having another child.

This would also explain why it impacted the intensive margin (children per mother) but not the extensive margin (percent women who are mothers).

I don't have a problem with WFH where it makes sense, and I do think many societies need to look at how to help young adults become parents, but I am a bit skeptical of this particular relation. If you've ever been a parent with a young child at home, your estimate of how much work you could do would be possible is a lot more modest.