The Price of Sterility - According to Catherine Pakaluk

At the Mises Institute’s 2026 Austrian Economics Research Conference, the Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture on March 20 was delivered by economist Catherine Ruth Pakaluk under a deliberately provocative title: Sterile Money, Fiat Sex: The End of Growth, in One Lesson. The afternoon program also featured the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture chaired by Jesús Huerta de Soto; a tangible sign of the influence Austrian libertarianism continues to exert in Auburn’s academic milieu.

The tone for the morning had been set moments earlier by Joseph T. Salerno. His introductory remarks conveyed a sincere tribute to Huerta de Soto’s Madrid School, to its scientific ambition and moral stature, while also offering a warning that deserves the utmost attention. The democratic socialism that has gained such prominence since Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York, though outwardly less brutal than the old Marxist left, may in fact prove even more insidious. Rather than bursting dramatically onto the political stage, this ideology works its way into institutional centers, infiltrates the conscience of individuals, and is then gradually normalised throughout society. It was against this backdrop that Pakaluk’s lecture took shape.

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 An economist and social philosopher at the Catholic University of America, trained at Harvard under Oliver Hart, Pakaluk is the author of Hannah’s Children, the book that established her as one of the foremost authorities on the contemporary birth dearth. The conference’s official presentation summarized her argument with striking clarity, drawing a connection between fiat money, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the ensuing collapse in fertility. Her central thesis was that a civilisation built upon “sterile” choices cannot sustain genuine, lasting growth.

The title of her address already contained, in embryonic form, the diagnosis of the phenomenon. Pakaluk took seriously Henry Hazlitt’s teaching, namely the economist’s duty to look beyond immediate effects and trace the long-term consequences of institutions. The contraceptive “revolution” or, more properly, involution should not be judged solely by the instant advantage it promises individuals, just as money severed from the gold standard should not be assessed merely by the flexibility it grants governments and central banks. Both must be examined in light of the behaviors they generate, the habits they legitimize, and the psychology of time they embody.

The speaker’s central argument was presented with courage and remarkable thematic consistency. In her view, the West has, in near parallel fashion, broken through two barriers that once oriented it toward the future. The first was monetary. Beginning in 1944, the Bretton Woods system preserved an order based on fixed exchange rates centered on the dollar and its convertibility into gold. That system became fully operational in 1958 and was swept away in 1971 by Richard Nixon’s reckless decision. The second barrier was biological and moral. The contraceptive pill was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. In 1965, the Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, recognized a “right to contraception” for married couples. In 1972, Eisenstadt v. Baird extended that principle to unmarried adults. Though distinct processes, Pakaluk reads them as animated by the same desire to emancipate the present from the price it imposes on the future.

It follows that the collapse in the global population outlook should not be seen as merely one sociological episode among many, but rather as the symptom of a dangerous transformation. In the United States, the total fertility rate still stood at 3.55 children per woman in 1960. By 1976 it had already fallen to 1.74, well below the natural replacement threshold of 2.1. In other words, the transformation was already complete when many observers were still treating it as a temporary adjustment or as a simple by-product of economic prosperity.

Pakaluk insisted on what might be called a shock in the demand for children. For centuries, the implicit question in Western societies had been this: when should one stop? After the contraceptive “revolution,” the question was reversed: when should one stop using contraception in order to have a child? Hidden within that semantic reversal is an anthropological metamorphosis. The child is no longer welcomed as the ordinary outgrowth of family life, but becomes a deferred and selected event, contingent upon a long chain of economic, psychological, professional, and housing conditions.

The scholar traced this shift to three main vectors. First, modern economic growth, which expands the sphere of consumption and multiplies alternatives to family formation. Second, the hypertrophy of the welfare state, which substitutes an impersonal system of public guarantees for the organic responsibilities embedded in human bonds. Third, the aggressive normalization of contraception throughout the 1960s and 1970s, which severs the unity between sexual acts and procreation. Nor did she neglect the old prejudice of overpopulation, that Malthusian fallacy that survived long after empirical reality had disproved it.

Money, Pakaluk argued, is not a neutral veil. It is the medium through which property rights are exchanged, and therefore the mechanism that spontaneously coordinates expectations, renunciations, plans, savings, and investments. When central banks bring about an indiscriminate expansion of the monetary base, they alter the natural relationship individuals have with time. If money becomes elastic, manipulable, and detached from any external constraint, the very structure of incentives changes. The short term becomes tyrannical, waiting loses its dignity, prudence comes to be regarded as dullness. Sacrifice thereby ceases to be an economic virtue and is recast as an anomaly that is difficult to justify rationally.

Pakaluk condensed the outcome of this long mutation in Western civilisation into the formula “More present, less future.” We possess more money, yet we have less purchasing power. We have more sex, yet fewer children are born. We pride ourselves on a nominal freedom of choice greater than in the past, yet we show less concrete willingness to undertake lasting commitments. The baleful effect of social irresponsibility is the retreat of fatherhood, advancing in tandem with ever earlier sexual initiation, the spread of promiscuous behavior, and the loss of the family’s normative centrality. The decline of traditional morality thus represents both a consequence of economic disorder and, in turn, one of its causes.

Particularly effective, in this respect, was her invocation of G. K. Chesterton. In Sex and Property, he writes that reducing property to the mere enjoyment of money is akin to reducing love to the mere enjoyment of sex. In both cases, unrestrained hedonism displaces participation in a creative process of far greater scope. Pakaluk leaned precisely on this analogy. Sterile money and sterile sex, in her account, name two parallel modes of consuming reality. They neither build nor hand anything down to posterity, nor do they generate an order others can fruitfully inhabit. Another notable passage concerned Theodore Roosevelt. As early as 1905, the American president was speaking of “race suicide” in reference to shrinking families. The following year, he went so far as to describe “willful sterility” as a sin bound to issue in national death. Pakaluk invoked these historical precedents with caution, without concealing their moralistic overtones or the eugenic undertones typical of that era.

Among the most felicitous images in the lecture was her reference to the horses that disappeared from New York within just a few years after the advent of electric taxis, first registered in 1908. The comparison was meant to show how swiftly a technological innovation can overturn a custom that once seemed immovable. The same, she argued, occurred with fertility in Western countries. Once the intrinsic bond between sexuality, marriage, and procreation had been disarticulated, the demand for children underwent a sudden and irreversible collapse.

Pakaluk lifted the birth crisis out of the administrative, behaviorist, and purely sentimental frameworks that today dominate academic debate. She did not speak of “work-life balance” in the bureaucratic sense so beloved of mainstream economists, nor of marginal incentives, nor of therapeutic slogans. The professor at the Busch School of Business brought the problem of depopulation back to its cultural root. A society grows and prospers only when it is capable of perpetuating itself into future generations. Desire that claims to be freed from every form, like money emancipated from every measure and debt elevated into the permanent horizon of contemporary democracies, gives rise to a civilisation that survives by eroding the very preconditions on which it rests.

If you believed that monetary institutions and sexual mores belonged to different intellectual domains, Catherine Pakaluk’s speech may well have unsettled you. Money and the patterns of intimate life simultaneously shape the relationship a society maintains with the future. And a society that no longer honors the future will, sooner or later, cease to generate it. Lorenzo Cianti studies Political Science and International Relations at Roma Tre University. He writes for Italy’s oldest opinion magazine L'Opinione delle Libertà, as well as for the online magazine Atlantico Quotidiano and the Mises Institute. He writes about economical, philosiphical cultural and political topics.

Image credits: Emil Widlund via Unsplash via Unsplash