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Notes -
Towards a grand unified theory of birth rate collapse
Ask someone without any interest in the topic why birth rates are collapsing globally or in their own country, and they will usually find some way of saying it's too expensive. Either wages aren't high enough, house prices are too high, childcare costs too much. Often they will bring in their own pet issue as a rationalisation (global warming, inequality, immigration, taxes).
They are of course, wrong. Global GDP per capita has never been higher, and global TFR has never been lower. Countries with higher GDP per capita numbers tend to have lower birth rates, although the relationship isn't necessarily causal. Clearly, 'we can't afford it' isn't factually true.
So what is causing it? There are certainly things that governments and cultures can and have done to encourage births on the margins. Cheaper housing does allow earlier household formation, which increases births. Dense housing suppresses birth rates, even if the dense housing lowers overall housing costs. Religiosity increases birth rates, all other things being equal. Tax cuts for parents increase birth rates. Marriage increases birth rates vs cohabiting. Young people living with their parents decreases birth rates. Immigration of high-TFR groups works until the second generation. Generous maternity leave and cheap childcare seem to help. However, none of these seem to be decisive. There are countries that do everything right and yet birth rates still continue to decline.
The universality of the birth rate collapse suggests that the main cause must be something more fundamental then any of the policies or cultural practices I have named. Something that affects every country and people (with a few notable exceptions that will be the key to working out what's going on).
Substacker Becoming Noble proposes that the birth rate collapse is caused by one thing:
Status
I won't spend too much time summarising the article. It is excellently written and I wouldn't do it justice. The key thing to take away is that, within global culture, having children is neutral or negative for status.
But let's apply the hypothesis to various groups with unusually high or low birth rates and see if they match the predicition.
Becoming Noble gives the example of Koreans. Infamously, South Korea has the lowest birth rate on the planet. It is also hyper-competitive and status obsessed. Children spend most of their waking hours studying for the all-important college entrance exam, so they can get into the best college, to get into the best company from a small selection of prestigious Chaebols (the most prestigious is Samsung, as you'd imagine). According to Malcolm Collins, the Korean language even requires its speakers to refer to people based on their job title, even in non-professional settings. In a country which is defined by zero-sum status competition, the main casualty is fertility.
Of course, South Koreans aren't the only East Asians to have low birth rates. All East Asian countries have very low birth rates, and the East Asian diaspora also has very low birth rates, even in relatively high-TFR countries like the USA or Australia.
Richard Hanania proposes that East Asians, being particularly conformist, are particularly sensitive to the status trade-offs of having children. This would explain why we see similarly low TFRs among the diaspora.
So now we move on to groups with unusually high TFRs. The most famous are the Amish and the Hasidic/Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The Amish are rural, religious people, so we would expect them to have a relatively high TFR, but even compared to other rural Americans, the Amish stand out for extremely high fertility. They don't spend long in school, they marry young (and don't allow divorce) and stick to traditional gender roles. But according to this description of Amish life, the key factor is that among the Amish, being married and having a large family is high status, for both men and women. Amish culture is cut off from global culture in important ways. They are not exposed to television or the internet, they don't socialise much with the English, and they are limited in what modern status goods they can buy. So for young Amish, the only way to gain any status is to marry and have children.
Unlike the Amish, the Haredim are urban people. Instead of leaving school at 14, the young men spend their most productive years in Torah study, supported by their wives and government benefits or charity. Meanwhile, their women pop out children and work at the same time. Urban living, extended education, and a rejection of traditional gender roles should all suppress their fertility, but they don't. Tove (Wood from Eden) proposes that the religious restrictions on Haredi men reduce the worry from Haredi women that their menfolk might leave them. This, combined with a religiously-motivated rejection of global culture encourages them to focus their status-seeking energies on having large families. This also seems to have the knock-on effect of increasing Israeli birth rates among other Jewish groups there.
Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline. Pronatalist Daniel Hess argues that this is because these countries make motherhood high status in a way that most others don't. Their Soviet history and the fact that their languages don't use the Latin alphabet means that the populations are not very exposed to English-language global culture.
So what is to be done? There is of course no magic button that a president can push to make parenthood high status. But the most obvious thing would be for governments to simply tell their citizens that having children is pro-social. They should promote having kids the same way they promote recycling or public transport. Promoting marriage would likely help, as well as pivoting school sex education away from avoiding teenage pregnancy (which has essentially disappeared in the developed world) and towards avoiding unplanned childlessness.
So, I had some thoughts on this topic come up when watching the Nostalgia Critic review tv commercials from the 80s and 90s — specifically, the “baby doll” commercials. Ads for dolls that cry, and wet themselves, and such; with those all held up as selling points for the toy. In particular, the 1996 “Take Care of Me Twins,” with their burping, drooling, runny noses, etc., and how stressed out the girl in the ad looks — and this is intended to make girls want these dolls? And yet…
Which reminded me of the 2016 Australian study discussed here, about how baby simulator dolls intended for education programs discouraging teen pregnancy — replacing the old “haul around a bag of flour for a week” method they used back when I was in “health” class — actually increased a girl’s probability of having a kid by age 20 (and, interestingly, also “a 6% lower proportion of abortions, compared with the control group”). This raises a few points, starting with the fact that as family sizes have gotten smaller, society has become more atomized, birthrates have fallen, and childcare has been increasingly professionalized, the amount of exposure people — particularly young people — have to babies and infants has definitely declined.
First, like the article notes, there’s nothing that triggers “baby fever” in some woman like spending time around babies — or even just a quality simulacrum of one. But with no extended family, fewer siblings (and siblings closer together in age), no babysitting the neighbors’ toddler for a couple hours as a teen, fewer of the women in their friend group having kids and bringing the baby around for everyone to coo over, and so on, how many people these days can go most of their life with minimal exposure to cute young humans? So many women end up with their only exposure to maternal-instinct-triggering-stimuli being small animals, and then we wonder why they end up with “fur babies” instead of children? (It’s a sort of feedback loop.)
Relatedly, people have mentioned the decline of alloparenting in the context of not having Grandma around to help with the kids anymore. But go far enough back, and plenty of alloparenting used to be done by younger relatives too. Back when you could have families of five, six, or more siblings, spread out across a decade or more. You’d have the older girls as teenagers helping out with their younger siblings, and then the younger girls as teens helping their older siblings out with their nieces and nephews. Teenagers babysitting younger kids. Many more girls would end up with some level of experience in child care before becoming mothers themselves. Now, how many women have no experience whatsoever before having a kid, making parenthood a sink-or-swim prospect of plunging straight into the metaphorical deep end?
Then, of course, there’s the messages that those anti-teen pregnancy education programs mentioned above end up sending. Sure, they’re supposed to be about delaying parenthood, but the actual message ends up being pretty antinatal. A lot about waiting to have kids “until you’re ready,” but nothing about what that readiness looks like. A lot about being too young to become a parent, but nothing about ending up too old to become a parent. The message is all “BABIES ARE HORRIBLE! HAVING ONE WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE FOREVER! PARENTHOOD IS SCARY! SCARY! SCARY!” We make the prospect of motherhood terrifying, give no opportunity to prepare for it, encourage delaying it until conditions are absolutely perfect… and then wonder why people aren’t having kids. Particularly when you add in everything discussed in this thread about safetyism and allergy to responsibility.
Note that this suggests another way we can help address the birthrate issue, by addressing the education issue here. Note, to some degree it’s simply a change in emphasis. That is, go from “don’t have kids (until you’re ready)” and “(teen) parenthood is awful” to “don’t have kids until you’re ready” and “teen parenthood is awful.” And, as noted above, it used to be that we could count on families and communities to teach people parenting skills prior to becoming one (making the prospect less scary), but, as also noted, social atomization and the decline itself have deprived us of this. Hence, the need for institutions to step in to fill that gap, and provide a way for young people to be taught and given practice in basic child care.
All of this, of course, is not to say that many of the other factors people point to — housing, the modern hyper-moble job market, the two-income “trap”, safetyism, decline of religion (or even just positive visions for the future) — don’t also matter quite a lot; nor that fixing middle school sex ed will reverse it entirely. But, as the old saying goes, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging it deeper.
I think that this is a very good take, but I would further add that I think "teen pregnancy" as a snarl phrase is a malformed or malicious meme to begin with, antinatalist in itself even before the emphasis is added. We should be trying to discourage unwed pregnancy, while encouraging women to have children inside of wedlock both early and often. Surely our society would be in much better condition than it is now if it was seen as a terribly unfeminine thing for a woman to be unmarried or childless at 16. It might seem gross, backwater, Muslimesque - but what did being liberal and feminist get us?
Agreed. (The decline of the "shotgun wedding" has probably been a net negative for society.)
In support of this, I'd note that at least some of the statistics on "teen pregnancy" define "teen" in the numerical sense rather than the conventional — that is, they count any female getting pregnant before age 20 ("Nineteen is in 'the teens,' so it counts!"). Thus, a woman marrying the summer after graduating high school at 18, and expecting her first child a year later, gets counted as a "teen pregnancy."
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