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An interesting thread on Twitter about status underlying fertility declines
I find that small “status is relative” comment valuable for understanding fertility trends. It’s obvious, but it’s an essential piece of the puzzle easy to ignore. There is a limited amount of status to go around, and we disperse status points as if we are in a video game dispersing points on a skill tree. We can only increase certain behaviors at the expense of other behaviors (through omitting esteem and interest, ie status). With that acknowledged, let’s remember that motherhood is a complicated and arduous 6-year process per baby (overlapping) which requires specific skills and a specific interest (nurturing a young human). This means that even if we did esteem motherhood as highly as women working traditional male jobs, that wouldn’t affect fertility because of the additional contingent pleasures of the workplace (socializing, disposable income, a familiarity of work skills via schooling and no familiarity with homemaking and motherhood skills). And so what is actually essential is to, well, actively dislike women working. To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to be degraded, demeaned, or at least lowered relative to women focusing on the life required to be mothers. This would appear to be necessary to increase fertility according to basic human psychology: the importance of status and reward-contingency as a necessary component of reinforcement. As long as women obtain status from work, it’s unlikely that attempts to hack together a high-status motherhood culture will work. If a guy can get status from video games or war, he will choose video games, right? Motherhood is more difficult and more important, so the status associated with and the lifestyle which precedes it needs to utterly dwarf the Industrial GirlBoss Complex.
I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.
For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.
Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.
None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.
Our insane economic success (in markets that aren't completely whack to to TRBL gov't intervention like healthcare, education, and housing) has allowed people's standards for how much they spend on children to go through the roof, rather than standards magically rising on their own beyond our economic means. Perhaps one could argue that child rearing is one of the few areas where there's a one-way ratchet, such that any increases in standards are 'locked in', such that any decreases in economic ability present significant challenges and drive huge decreases in fertility, but it really seems quite unlikely, especially given that we're still not significantly struggling economically by almost any real measure and that TFR doesn't really track things like recessions all that well. I'm much more likely to believe that it's general cultural/status factors.
Children are expensive, and have become far more expensive over the past century, in currencies which we have not become wealthier in, namely time and effort. Once responsibilities are non-delegable, no amount of money can make them lesser, and anyway cost disease and regulation has made most delegation of even the reasonably delegable parts of childcare out of reach to all but the wealthy. Except for the underclass, who simply fail to pay the extra costs.
I think the economic term for the phenomenon you're describing is 'opportunity cost'. That seems plausible to me, perhaps even likely. It's a similar explanation to what I've heard given as the reason why people seem to think they're always "busy"; they just have so much damn money and economic power/opportunity that choosing to not spend your time traveling, skiing, whatever, has a higher opportunity cost.
But I would stress that this is not strictly lack of material wealth or access to affordable goods. In any event, I had forgotten about this explanation, and would consider it a contender with other murkier cultural/status factors.
You can look at it that way, but I don't think it gets to the point. Parenting children is a lot of non-delegable work that takes up time. It's less that you could be doing other things in that time and those other things have become more valuable (which is "opportunity cost") than that the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased. That's an issue even if the only thing you could do with the time was no more valuable than it was a century ago.
I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things. That's kind of a sub-phenomenon of the general opportunity costs -> more "busy" result. Since people are so productive and so wealthy, they feel like they have to "do stuff" with their time (stuff that costs all that money they're making), and whether that's taking a fancy trip or taking your kid to fifty-three activities, it all feels like the same phenomenon to me.
Backing out, though, it really is just a different claim to say that children are more expensive, monetarily, in terms of the purchases required (with the intermediate step being that material wealth hasn't kept up with the increased monetary requirement) and saying that people are so wealthy that the real resource being budgeted and subject to opportunity cost is time. It brings us to substantially different conclusions about the underlying dynamics and possible policy considerations.
That time counts!
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