They were trying to convince everybody to have 3 kids

We were just here–pretty unusual to see a museum exposition devoted to a census, can’t get much more up my alley than that! It was good.

The above photo gives a sense of the charm of the exhibits, and they also had lots of objects and documents and film clips and maps, like this:

But the most interesting was this ad:

It reminds me of our post a couple years ago, Fewer kids in our future: How historical experience has distorted our sense of demographic norms. They were thinking of 3 kids as a normal level, but once you’re in a society with low infant and child mortality, the stable level is something like 2.1.

I looked up the organization that sponsored the ad, “Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française,” and it seemed to cover the political spectrum, left, right, and center. A little different from the have-more-kids movement today, which has more of a right-wing tint, perhaps because it’s in conflict with the left-wing environmentalist movement, which didn’t exist a hundred years ago.

As we also discussed, what people say is “the ideal number of children for a family to have?” is not the same as the number of kids they actually have. “The ideal number of children for a family” is some sort of traditional abstract idea, I guess kinda like how the ideal lifestyle is to go to church every day, to go to the gym three times a week, to have a long-term job that supports the entire family, to have a roaring fire at Christmastime, etc etc.

As you may have heard, the French government was actively encouraging reproduction:

And check out this scary-ass poster:

I’m convinced.