Yes, it's clearly mostly a cultural issue. The costs of having children are obvious, direct, and tangible (money, time, stress, responsibilities, fear of shame and judgment if children don't turn out well, physical transformation and danger for women) while the benefits are often vague and platitudinal ("children are our future," "it's the next step," "it's time to grow up," etc.). Without things like religion to create social and cultural rewards to influence people's behavior, of course people are going to look at those pros and cons above and either have few or no kids. A society can't just make having kids merely more affordable or less strenuous; it has to actively give high status to those who have kids. And you can't just legislate that.
One simple part of this whole thing is that having and raising kids is time consuming and often difficult. Some people naturally enjoy having children more than others, and when the economic imperative to have children is reduced, along with various social/cultural/religious encouragement, fewer people overall will do it, just like fewer people would do any difficult time consuming things if there are fewer incentives / less pressure.
The idea of kids as a capstone rather than foundational is counterproductive for the obvious reason that having kids is way more exhausting when you're older. And I agree that our culture instills utterly insane amounts of fear re: being a parent, motherhood in particular.
I start to pause at the notion that maybe we might want to change culture to encourage more people to have kids, not for doomer-reasons, but because I wonder if people are just rationally deciding that having children in the modern world is more trouble for most people than it is worth.
It seems broadly that as more people get the option to have less children, across cultures, they seem to take that option. Having children is costly, both in financial cost and opportunity cost terms. It has gotten more costly as time has gone on both in terms of financial cost (children now need more education and preparation to be successful compared to just doing physical labor on a farm) and in opportunity cost (the parents are giving up more opportunities, both professionally, and also just recreationally/personally, like traveling the world) by having children. My default assumption is that when people make a decision like this, they are making the right decision for them given the information they have.
It is hard to measure the counterfactual. Would the people who are opting to not have kids now be happier in the alternative reality where they did have kids? If they would not, is their unhappiness from childrearing balanced out by the societal imperative that someone needs to have kids and raise them?
Basically, I worry that if we try "cultural engineering" here, we might distort the non-financial (e.g. happiness) economic incentives here, and create some deadweight loss that destroys a lot of value (e.g. happiness, freedom) for everyone. At the same time, I concede that there's no particular reason to think the cultural norms we have settled on at the moment are perfectly calibrated to exactly maximize everyone's happiness/well-being/etc, so there might very well be room to move them in a better direction.
Yes, it is a cultural issue. But a lot of culture is what people do. Teenage pregnancy rates peaked in the late 1950's and fell thereafter. Falling rates of this were seen as positive in the 1990's because teenage pregnancy meant poverty and poor prospects for the children. It was a social problem. But in those earlier times, teenage pregnancy often meant marriage with the father getting a job to support his family. That was the social norm. Backing this norm was an economy in which a person starting out in an unskilled job would earn a wage that would provide a lower working-class lifestyle and continued to do so going forward. If the guy had anything on the ball, he would get a better job or advance in some other way so that by the time he was in his late 20's was earning enough for a working class lifestyle (and they would have a couple more kids). If he was above average in ability, his family would end up solidly middle class.
SInce 1980 such a couple would not make it. The boy would get this entry level job. But the income this job earns would fall relative to living standards. If he did make efforts to advance all he would achieve is to keep the working poor lifestyle they had at the start. The economic environment (that reflects economic culture that is set by economic policy) is simply not conducive for this couple to make a go of it. They don't have a chance. The families and individuals involved sense this and the marriage doesn't happen. What was an embarrassing oopsie becomes a social problem and the larger culture acts to encourage kids to delay sexual activity and to use protection to avoid too-early pregnancy.
What conservative analyzes ignore is we had a higher fertility culture, yet conservative went forth with a bunch of sweeping tax cuts and other economy policy that had dramatic effects on economic culture and practice with no care as to what this would do to families.
This is a great post (subscribing). However, let me just point out one thing. Take a look at your "Parents Find Child Care Meaningful" graph. 62% find it very meaningfully. So, 38% do not. (No doubt, some of those 38% find it "meaningful," just not "very meaningful." Still.) Thus, fertility is likely to drop even further. If your mother didn't enjoy motherhood, and you have the option of forgoing the whole thing (in the way that you do *not* have the option of forgoing employment), well then...
There is no fertility “crisis”, smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and help save the other species we share the planet with by protecting their shrinking habitat.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food. Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable”.
2. Israel is a direct refutation of the “Econ is everything” theory. Even secular Jews have a TFR above replacement in Israel. I’ve been told that it’s a “sign they buy into the ethos of the state”.
3. I remember seeing a study (which I can’t find) that claimed that Brazilian TFR started dropping when telenovelas showed smaller families. I wonder if a) that is replicable and b) that works in the other direction
I don't find much to disagree about causes of lower fertility. I do think the consequences need not be as bad as stated: less innovation, less dynamism, unsustainable pension systems. There are policies, which have there own rationale are not that could address those negatives as well as some the push back at the reasons for lower fertility.
In the U.S., at least, I find it hard to believe that housing policy doesn't play a huge role: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21154/w21154.pdf. NIMBYism has massively raised the cost of housing, particularly in the most economically productive areas. Anecdotally, everyone I know who is delaying having kids or having fewer than they'd like cites the cost of housing. And that is true of me as well.
Something happened in the 1970s that caused the U.S. to lose its interest in building and doing new things, and there's some cultural factor underlying that. Thus for example https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/.
Japan is the great counterexample to the housing-and-births thesis but Japan seems to have many of its own challenges, particularly in terms of work and work culture.
Ms., this is the single best article on the subject i have yet read. Agree, agree, agree.
I disagree only to the extent that I (a leftist millennial anglophone woman) consider this predominantly intractable from a biological perspective. But not for any of the reasons thus far explored in media articles. Henry Gee’s “Extinction debt” gets the closest. Pop gen and WGS might shed light.
Older dads, rare variant burden ala Akexey Kondrashov, indiscriminate untested admixture, loss of reproductive variance, changing density/disease ecology, all nails in the coffin probably.
Lifetime chronic disease burden. Half of women my age and older seem to have significant health burdens, such that if they could reach desired fertility with an extended fertile window, their other physical issues would discourage it.
I call it a loss-of-fitness incident pit. A case of the Anna Karenina principle. There are vastly more ways to be low fitness than to be high fitness.
I tip my hat to you for such incredible thought, research, and writing.
That was a great, clear-eyed article. I agree that culture is the main driver, but I don't think economic arrangements, status anxiety, valorizing parents, or (on the contrary side) anti-natalist narratives make a significant impact on fertility rates - the only thing that matters is access to cheap and effective contraception.
There's no putting the genie back in the bottle, and I wouldn't want to, since I'm a garden-variety cosmopolitan liberal anyway, but I'd argue contraception is a hack that defeats millions of years of evolution. The main cultural forces that have been able to stem or reverse the decline have involved religious groups (or the state in the case of Ceaușescu's Romainia) interfering with access to birth control.
The other cultural issues seem to have only tiny, marginal impacts; maybe some policy could work that isn't tied to reducing access to birth control, but the magnitude would have to be inconceivable by our current standards.
What are the examples of successful attempts to intentionally steer culture? The only movements I can think of are all some variants of identity politics. For pronatalism, this seems counter to the entire purpose, because isn't the whole idea is that childrearing should go back to being a default, and not a decision to belong to some unusual group?
Yes, it's clearly mostly a cultural issue. The costs of having children are obvious, direct, and tangible (money, time, stress, responsibilities, fear of shame and judgment if children don't turn out well, physical transformation and danger for women) while the benefits are often vague and platitudinal ("children are our future," "it's the next step," "it's time to grow up," etc.). Without things like religion to create social and cultural rewards to influence people's behavior, of course people are going to look at those pros and cons above and either have few or no kids. A society can't just make having kids merely more affordable or less strenuous; it has to actively give high status to those who have kids. And you can't just legislate that.
One simple part of this whole thing is that having and raising kids is time consuming and often difficult. Some people naturally enjoy having children more than others, and when the economic imperative to have children is reduced, along with various social/cultural/religious encouragement, fewer people overall will do it, just like fewer people would do any difficult time consuming things if there are fewer incentives / less pressure.
The idea of kids as a capstone rather than foundational is counterproductive for the obvious reason that having kids is way more exhausting when you're older. And I agree that our culture instills utterly insane amounts of fear re: being a parent, motherhood in particular.
I start to pause at the notion that maybe we might want to change culture to encourage more people to have kids, not for doomer-reasons, but because I wonder if people are just rationally deciding that having children in the modern world is more trouble for most people than it is worth.
It seems broadly that as more people get the option to have less children, across cultures, they seem to take that option. Having children is costly, both in financial cost and opportunity cost terms. It has gotten more costly as time has gone on both in terms of financial cost (children now need more education and preparation to be successful compared to just doing physical labor on a farm) and in opportunity cost (the parents are giving up more opportunities, both professionally, and also just recreationally/personally, like traveling the world) by having children. My default assumption is that when people make a decision like this, they are making the right decision for them given the information they have.
It is hard to measure the counterfactual. Would the people who are opting to not have kids now be happier in the alternative reality where they did have kids? If they would not, is their unhappiness from childrearing balanced out by the societal imperative that someone needs to have kids and raise them?
Basically, I worry that if we try "cultural engineering" here, we might distort the non-financial (e.g. happiness) economic incentives here, and create some deadweight loss that destroys a lot of value (e.g. happiness, freedom) for everyone. At the same time, I concede that there's no particular reason to think the cultural norms we have settled on at the moment are perfectly calibrated to exactly maximize everyone's happiness/well-being/etc, so there might very well be room to move them in a better direction.
Yes, it is a cultural issue. But a lot of culture is what people do. Teenage pregnancy rates peaked in the late 1950's and fell thereafter. Falling rates of this were seen as positive in the 1990's because teenage pregnancy meant poverty and poor prospects for the children. It was a social problem. But in those earlier times, teenage pregnancy often meant marriage with the father getting a job to support his family. That was the social norm. Backing this norm was an economy in which a person starting out in an unskilled job would earn a wage that would provide a lower working-class lifestyle and continued to do so going forward. If the guy had anything on the ball, he would get a better job or advance in some other way so that by the time he was in his late 20's was earning enough for a working class lifestyle (and they would have a couple more kids). If he was above average in ability, his family would end up solidly middle class.
SInce 1980 such a couple would not make it. The boy would get this entry level job. But the income this job earns would fall relative to living standards. If he did make efforts to advance all he would achieve is to keep the working poor lifestyle they had at the start. The economic environment (that reflects economic culture that is set by economic policy) is simply not conducive for this couple to make a go of it. They don't have a chance. The families and individuals involved sense this and the marriage doesn't happen. What was an embarrassing oopsie becomes a social problem and the larger culture acts to encourage kids to delay sexual activity and to use protection to avoid too-early pregnancy.
What conservative analyzes ignore is we had a higher fertility culture, yet conservative went forth with a bunch of sweeping tax cuts and other economy policy that had dramatic effects on economic culture and practice with no care as to what this would do to families.
This is a great post (subscribing). However, let me just point out one thing. Take a look at your "Parents Find Child Care Meaningful" graph. 62% find it very meaningfully. So, 38% do not. (No doubt, some of those 38% find it "meaningful," just not "very meaningful." Still.) Thus, fertility is likely to drop even further. If your mother didn't enjoy motherhood, and you have the option of forgoing the whole thing (in the way that you do *not* have the option of forgoing employment), well then...
There is no fertility “crisis”, smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and help save the other species we share the planet with by protecting their shrinking habitat.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food. Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable”.
Few thoughts:
1. I thought replacement TFR was 2.1, not 2.06?
2. Israel is a direct refutation of the “Econ is everything” theory. Even secular Jews have a TFR above replacement in Israel. I’ve been told that it’s a “sign they buy into the ethos of the state”.
3. I remember seeing a study (which I can’t find) that claimed that Brazilian TFR started dropping when telenovelas showed smaller families. I wonder if a) that is replicable and b) that works in the other direction
I don't find much to disagree about causes of lower fertility. I do think the consequences need not be as bad as stated: less innovation, less dynamism, unsustainable pension systems. There are policies, which have there own rationale are not that could address those negatives as well as some the push back at the reasons for lower fertility.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/population-fear-of-falling
In the U.S., at least, I find it hard to believe that housing policy doesn't play a huge role: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21154/w21154.pdf. NIMBYism has massively raised the cost of housing, particularly in the most economically productive areas. Anecdotally, everyone I know who is delaying having kids or having fewer than they'd like cites the cost of housing. And that is true of me as well.
The policies that raise the cost of housing (https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/7/19/15993936/high-cost-of-free-parking) also raise the cost of things like daycare.
Something happened in the 1970s that caused the U.S. to lose its interest in building and doing new things, and there's some cultural factor underlying that. Thus for example https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/.
Japan is the great counterexample to the housing-and-births thesis but Japan seems to have many of its own challenges, particularly in terms of work and work culture.
Ms., this is the single best article on the subject i have yet read. Agree, agree, agree.
I disagree only to the extent that I (a leftist millennial anglophone woman) consider this predominantly intractable from a biological perspective. But not for any of the reasons thus far explored in media articles. Henry Gee’s “Extinction debt” gets the closest. Pop gen and WGS might shed light.
Older dads, rare variant burden ala Akexey Kondrashov, indiscriminate untested admixture, loss of reproductive variance, changing density/disease ecology, all nails in the coffin probably.
Lifetime chronic disease burden. Half of women my age and older seem to have significant health burdens, such that if they could reach desired fertility with an extended fertile window, their other physical issues would discourage it.
I call it a loss-of-fitness incident pit. A case of the Anna Karenina principle. There are vastly more ways to be low fitness than to be high fitness.
I tip my hat to you for such incredible thought, research, and writing.
I enjoyed reading this, as much for the quality of the writing as for the persuasive argument. I will pass it around.
That was a great, clear-eyed article. I agree that culture is the main driver, but I don't think economic arrangements, status anxiety, valorizing parents, or (on the contrary side) anti-natalist narratives make a significant impact on fertility rates - the only thing that matters is access to cheap and effective contraception.
There's no putting the genie back in the bottle, and I wouldn't want to, since I'm a garden-variety cosmopolitan liberal anyway, but I'd argue contraception is a hack that defeats millions of years of evolution. The main cultural forces that have been able to stem or reverse the decline have involved religious groups (or the state in the case of Ceaușescu's Romainia) interfering with access to birth control.
The other cultural issues seem to have only tiny, marginal impacts; maybe some policy could work that isn't tied to reducing access to birth control, but the magnitude would have to be inconceivable by our current standards.
What are the examples of successful attempts to intentionally steer culture? The only movements I can think of are all some variants of identity politics. For pronatalism, this seems counter to the entire purpose, because isn't the whole idea is that childrearing should go back to being a default, and not a decision to belong to some unusual group?
Excellent, thoughtful piece. Yet another example of the (Glenn) Loury principle: social relations before economic transactions.
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/cvandbio/Relations%20Before%20Transactions%20Loury.pdf
Great piece!
I agree that it's mostly cultural, and not easy to fix by policies:
https://www.mangosorbananas.com/p/south-koreas-low-fertility-problem
One word: Hatchery.