Culture, Policy and Birth Rates: a follow-up

A follow-up to my previous piece based on comments, criticisms and media coverage

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a pretty long piece arguing that Culture beats Policy when it comes to modulating birth rates (and also took the opportunity to diss Policy more broadly). Since then, two major publications (The Times and The Financial Times, with the latter citing my piece) have covered the topic and I received a fair bunch of comments/criticisms. So I thought I should address all of them in a follow-up.

The basic argument in my piece isn't new, yet most often, it's supported by comparing TFRs and policies in different countries, with a particular focus on those in Europe. I find this pretty convincing, but there are always caveats to this type of analysis that people bring up. So, rather than comparing countries against each other, I turned my focus to historical periods within single nations where extreme versions of cultural or policy shifts occurred. Specifically, I looked at the desecularization that took place in 18th century France and the stringent pro-natalist policies in communist Romania. This approach allowed me to sidestep the common pitfalls of cross-country comparisons — arguments about unique circumstances of each country that might affect the outcome of certain policies. Because they are pretty huge shifts, it also gets around over the argument that pro-family policies are ineffectual because they are too “weak”. I am not saying my argument has zero flaws, but I think it provides pretty compelling evidence for how important Culture is versus specific Policies.

As I mentioned before, the discourse further progressed since my piece was published. To begin with, Robert Colvile at The Times laments the fact that UK is behind most other countries in family-friendly policy. He then goes on to directly link this state of affairs to the decrease in birth rates that UK has been experiencing. I fully agree with policies aimed at making life for young people easier — although what I think is most needed is simply removing policies that actively make it harder. Parenthood, stressful as it is, is made even harder by stuff like high housing prices, which could be partially tackled by removing cumbersome regulations on new buildings. But, as my Culture piece makes it clear, I am under no illusion that reversing these policies would cause birth rates to soar. It’s at best a way to maybe prevent further decline or, in a very optimistic scenario, bring them to something like 2012 levels. If you pay close attention, the idea that these policies would massively help birth rates is undermined WITHIN Robert’s article: he brings up the example of Germany as a country with very good family friendly policies that UK should emulate. But UK and Germany have basically identical TFRs! Not to mention Hungary and Italy, the other countries he holds as positive examples, which have even lower TFRs¹.

TFRs of Germany and France from the World Bank

On the other end of the spectrum, Financial Times takes the Culture proposition very seriously. JBM does a good job at showing that the level of investment in family-friendly policies does little to influence TFR.

Correlation between “cultural” and policy variables and TFR

I’d like to further dwell on two points he brings up: firstly, the inverse relationship between birth rates and anxiety, and secondly, the positive correlation between the formation of relationships and birth rates.

But just as significant as any individual concern is the sheer amount of anxiety among young adults today. Two pieces of further research from Stone show that the more worried a prospective young mother is, the fewer children she intends to have. Combined with the fact that under-30s in western Europe, east Asia and the Anglosphere are more anxious and stressed than their elders, this may well push birth rates even lower.

Both of these worry me — our Culture directly works to enhance anxiety in young adults, something I have covered before and dubbed “The Cultural Anxietying”. The messaging around relationships is not much better either. Only this week, we learned that Andrew Huberman, a well known health influencer, had an (unknowing) harem of 6 or more women and a book extolling the benefits of leaving your husband became a NYT bestseller. I cannot comment on the veracity of the claims made in the article about Huberman and I have my issues with publicly discussing the lives of influencers. But the reactions from men on twitter were telling: many were saying that even if he did do all of the things described in the piece, Huberman was not really wrong. That’s what alpha males do (lie)! To complement this attitude, mainstream media regularly supports women publicly and loudly airing the dirty laundry in their marriages as a sort of liberation act. These women often end up portraying their husbands either as weak, ineffectual, contemptible creatures or abusive, manipulative monsters. To be clear — tabloid level stuff seems to have always been popular, but what has changed is that it’s now considered somehow virtuous to publicly demean and criticise your (ex) spouse. After all, “speaking your truth” is always brave! I can observe in real time, on social media, how being constantly bombarded with this type of content is creating a rift between men and women, a rift that risks separating our Culture into The Longhouse and The Gooncave — two extreme versions of femininity and masculinity that end up bringing the worst in both sexes.

Now, moving on to the criticisms of my piece. Some argued that using Romania as an example is not really supporting my case, since Romania’s policies did increase birth rates. There are 2 points here to be made: these were very, very harsh policies that would be next to impossible to implement in any liberal country. And even then, by the end of the Communist Regime, TFR in Romania was slightly below replacement. We are talking here about major restrictions to personal freedom which resulted in birth rates that are far from impressive. What is even more striking to me is that these impositions did not have any long-lasting effect on Culture: as soon as the policies were dropped, TFR went down to 1.3. What’s more, I think there is reason to believe the least morally desirable and politically unfeasible parts of Romania’s policies — the ban on contraception — were the most effective in increasing birth rates. There are two reasons why I attribute such a large part of the increase in TFR to the contraception ban. Firstly, the pro-natalist policies of the Communist Era were famous for causing an uptick in the number of orphans, with some of them ending up being trafficked abroad and leading to international coverage. The other clue to this is that the post Revolution drop in TFR was closely connected to a staggering increase in abortions. In essence, more babies were born “in error” — something that I do not think is in any way desirable.

Evolution of TFR in Romania versus comparable countries. Pro-natal policies were introduced in 1970 and lifted in 1990.

Another argument I have seen, is that I cannot deny Economic Forces are important. For instance, urbanisation is associated with birth-rate declines. But I am not really saying Economics is not relevant anywhere: in my model, Economic Forces would be subsumed into the Biology part —which I highlight to be the other important pillar, alongside Culture. That might sound kooky, but let me explain: Economic changes mostly affect the material circumstances one experiences. My piece is not anti-materialist and I postulate that material circumstances DO influence human behaviour in somewhat predictable ways, due to some level of consistency in our Biology. For example, all else equal, I would expect having to work 60 hr weeks versus 20 hour weeks to cause a decrease in birth rates, because humans, almost invariably, need a certain amount of relaxation/free time, and kids and work would compete for that free time. On top of our relatively invariant Biology, we have Culture to modulate how we react to these material circumstances. My piece mostly highlights the relative impotence of policies targeted specifically at increasing birth rates, compared to culture. This is very different from saying material conditions do not matter.

Finally, Twitter user @post_liberal suggested that the factors contributing to a country's wealth might inherently cause it to have a low Total Fertility Rate (TFR). I'm unsure why I was supposed to spell this out in my essay, especially since it doesn't seem to be a particularly groundbreaking or contentious idea. In fact, the concept is virtually taken for granted on the Demographic Transition Wikipedia page, which implies that as nations progress, their birth rates will inexorably decline.

Criticism to my piece

However, this is grounded in historical observations. The critical, unanswered question remains: "Can a culture be cultivated that supports a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) at or above replacement level within a developed nation?" The future exists for us to attempt to mold it. I maintain a cautious optimism: Yes, it's challenging, but what other choice do we have? I certainly do not want to RETVRN to a pre-industrial society. The arch of history is long and many things can happen. Changing Culture is not the only lever at our disposal, either. We can modulate Biology too, for example by extending female reproductive span and offer women a longer window for having children. Again, just as Robert Colvile’s piece contains key pieces of information undermining its main argument, Pete’s own tweets contradict his overly pessimistic outlook. One of the analogies that he makes is with obesity: “The best analogy for global fertility declines is obesity. Obesity is a problem but its generally a problem of more affluent societies & thats why obesity is a difficult problem to tackle bc we are more obese, in part, bc we are more affluent, & we don’t want to be less affluent.” Yet we seem to be on track to substantially reducing obesity via biological interventions. Who’s to say we cannot do something similar for fertility?

1. One can argue that for Italy and Hungary the pro-family policies have not had time to show their effects and/or the overall poor(er) state of their economies is a confounding factor.