Sperm Racing

And Other Bold Solutions to the Baby Shortage

This post was provoked by an article in the New York Times Magazine titled “Sperm Racing.” By the end of my reading, I was laughing so hard at the magnificent absurdity of men and their gullibility that my sides ached, and tears were rolling down my face. My second thought was: “Why didn’t I think of that?” I, too, could have been a billionaire. I have failed to monetize obvious nonsense for decades, and frankly, I am embarrassed.

For those of you who missed it, the premise is straightforward: sperm, it turns out, have been racing all along. They just haven’t had a decent track. The proposed solution is to give them one. Presumably, with tiny bleachers, a starting pistol, and a viewing audience of investors who nodded through the pitch with straight faces. The venture is, as they say in Silicon Valley, “scalable.”

I am always amused when I hear about the epiphanies people have about facts that have been known for years, had they been paying attention. They wake up one morning, glance at a headline, and breathlessly announce, “Oh my goodness, we are not having enough babies.” The tone is that of someone who has just invented fire and is looking around for someone to tell.

The proclamations tend toward the apocalyptic: “If we don’t replace the ones leaving us, the current economy is doomed!” Then, with the confidence of one who has thought about this for a full twenty minutes, they explain why it’s happening and how to fix it. The explanation is always short. The confidence is enormous. The research is nonexistent.

Demographers who have spent entire careers studying exactly this phenomenon are sitting quietly at their desks, watching the discourse, slowly closing their laptops.

Because these newly minted population experts are unaware of the decades’ worth of prodigious research already conducted, they are free to invent their own reasons. And as is the case with most simpletons—and I use the word with clinical precision—they identify exactly one cause and declare it to the world, usually on social media, but occasionally in print if the editor was asleep when the manuscript arrived.

The single-cause theories are endlessly varied and reliably wrong.

• The Childcare Constituency: Women aren’t having babies because the government doesn’t provide free childcare. The solution -free childcare. When presented with data showing that countries offering generous childcare subsidies have not reversed their fertility declines, adherents of this theory respond by demanding better childcare.

• The Parental Leave Caucus: Employers don’t provide enough time off. If fathers were given six months of paternity leave, the birth rate would rebound. The evidence that Scandinavian countries with the world’s most generous leave policies are also experiencing below-replacement fertility is dismissed as a statistical anomaly, a conspiracy, or both.

• The Screen Time Panic: Smartphones are to blame. Young people are scrolling instead of procreating. The fix is unclear. Perhaps mandatory phone confiscation at age eighteen, followed by supervised courtship in conditions resembling the nineteenth century. Several editorial boards have suggested this in so many words.

• The Financial Despair School: Housing costs too much, weddings cost too much, strollers cost too much, and avocado toast costs too much. Lower costs, higher birth rates. Elegant. Wrong.

• The Climate Anxiety Movement: Young people are too worried about the planet to have children. Proposals have included “optimism campaigns” and, memorably, an op-ed suggesting that having children is itself an act of climate defiance, whatever that means.

• The Masculinity Crisis Division: Men have become insufficiently masculine, or possibly too masculine, depending on the ideology of the commentator. Either way, someone is not performing their reproductive duties, and the culprit is the other side’s politics. Precise mechanism unspecified.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the sperm.

There is some evidence that in many Western cultures, sperm counts and motility have declined over recent decades. This is worth investigating seriously. Researchers have done so. The picture is complicated: the data vary across populations, and the causes are likely multiple. Endocrine disruptors, obesity, sedentary lifestyles, perhaps the cumulative effects of tight trousers and laptop placement. The scientific literature on this subject is extensive, nuanced, and almost entirely ignored by the people proposing solutions.

What the New York Times Magazine introduced to the conversation is the notion that sperm, having slowed down, need competitive motivation. The solution: racing. Gametes, it seems, respond well to a good old-fashioned competition. One imagines training regimens. Perhaps coaching. A league structure, with promotion and relegation. The Indianapolis 500 of reproductive biology.

When asked historically why men produce several hundred million sperm per ejaculation, scientists have long noted that the overwhelming majority never reach their destination. They swim in circles, take wrong turns, never ask for directions, and generally behave as one might expect of several hundred million entities with no brain and a single objective. Like men. The proposed upgrade: a racetrack to focus their competitive instincts. The field of reproductive medicine was unavailable for comment, as it was busy doing science.

The venture capital community, however, was extremely available for comment. And for funding.

Let us briefly review what demographers actually know. Demographers who are paid and occasionally listened to have documented these patterns over more than a century of data.

As GDP rises and personal income increases, health and nutrition improve, and fertility falls. Dramatically. This is known as the demographic transition, and it has occurred in every country that has industrialized, without exception, regardless of culture, religion, or government policy. It is one of the most robust empirical regularities in the social sciences, which is presumably why it is so rarely mentioned in op-eds.

With lower infant mortality, there is less need to produce what previous generations pragmatically called “a basketful of children”, because historically, not all of them made it. When they do make it, you need fewer of them. This is not cynical; it is arithmetic.

Economic development dramatically expands opportunities for women. Higher female literacy, education, and career opportunities correlate reliably with delayed marriage and delayed childbirth. Women who have options exercise them. This should not surprise anyone who has ever met a woman.

The economics of children undergo a complete transformation in the shift from rural to urban life. In agricultural economies, children contribute to the economy from an early age. They help farm, they help with labor, they are, in the unsentimental language of economic historians, assets. In urbanized, developed economies, children require substantial financial investments in education and housing, and approximately 17 years’ worth of meals. They become, in economic terms, costs. Beloved, irreplaceable costs, but costs.

All of these factors combine, in proportions that vary by country, culture, and specific economic circumstances, to produce the fertility declines we observe. This has been documented beautifully and accessibly by the late Hans Rosling, chair of global health at the Karolinska Institute, whose TED Talks and BBC presentations remain among the most illuminating twenty minutes available to any person with an internet connection and an interest in not being wrong about the world. Do yourselves a favor. Watch one - the links are below.

Every country that has attempted simple-minded solutions has failed. But failure, in the realm of population policy, has never discouraged the next proposal. Here is a survey of interventions attempted, with outcomes:

• Cash bonuses for babies (Hungary, Russia, various): Governments have offered thousands of dollars per child. Result: small, temporary upticks in births, followed by reversion to trend, plus a new class of people who timed their family plans to capture the subsidy and then stopped. The babies were real; the demographic recovery was not.

• State-sponsored dating (Singapore, South Korea, Japan): When private citizens declined to find each other romantically compelling at sufficient rates, governments organized mixers and speed-dating events. Singapore’s matchmaking agency, the Social Development Unit (SDU), was mockingly dubbed “Single, Desperate and Ugly”.The birth rate did not recover.

• Mandatory optimism (proposed, various): Several commentators have suggested “cultural campaigns” to make parenthood seem more attractive. Apparently, young people are not having children because they have not seen enough promotional material. One assumes glossy brochures. Perhaps an influencer partnership. “Have you tried parenthood? Here’s a discount code.”

• Immigration: This works, in the sense that it actually maintains population levels, supports labor markets, and does not require anyone to race anything. It is therefore the least discussed solution in most countries experiencing fertility decline because it entails politically inconvenient trade-offs. We move on.

• Blaming the young: Extremely popular. Produces no babies but significant op-ed revenue. The mechanism by which public shaming of twenty-seven-year-olds increases the birth rate has not been proposed, but the practice continues.

• Taxing childlessness (proposed, Hungary; historical precedent, ancient Rome): The Romans tried this. Rome fell anyway. Draw your own conclusions, but perhaps don’t draw them in the direction of “we should try this again.”

• Restricting contraception and abortion access: Reduces reproductive autonomy; increases birth rates modestly and temporarily in some contexts; increases maternal mortality, reduces female workforce participation. It is a way to increase birth rates by reversing development, which, in turn, defeats the object. Proponents tend not to frame it this way.

• Sperm racing: Untested at scale. Promising, in the sense that it has attracted funding. May require a regulatory framework, a governing body, and eventually a Hall of Fame.

The honest answer, which no one wants to hear and which demographers have been saying for fifty years, is that below-replacement fertility is a consequence of the very prosperity and development that every government on earth is trying to achieve. It is, ironically, a success problem.

Countries with high economic development and strong social institutions will continue to have low birth rates. Countries can soften the transition through immigration and smart labor policy. They can make parenthood less economically punishing. They can improve work-life balance in ways that, on the margins, might move the needle. None of this will return industrialized societies to the fertility rates of agricultural ones, because the underlying economics have permanently changed.

This is not a catastrophe. It is an adjustment. Populations have been adjusting since there have been populations. The economy will adapt; it has done so before and under considerably less favorable conditions. The species is not at risk. The alarmism is, like most alarmism, more about the emotional needs of the alarmed than about the phenomenon being alarmed about.

In the meantime, if someone wants to put tiny lane markers in a Petri dish and charge admission, I genuinely respect the hustle. I should have thought of it myself. I could have been a billionaire.

Instead, I wrote this. You win some, you lose some.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/magazine/sperm-racing-silicon-valley.html

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen

Hans Rosling et al : Factfulness Illustrated: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think