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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.
I've seen that article before. It's plausible, I suppose, but I don't think that in countries like the US, the government confers much status, so there's not much to do there. The Trump administration probably confers anti-status.
There's a lot about this on the message boards this week, including a link to a fairly interesting article on the Reddit (by CanIHaveaSong, who sometimes used to post here). DSL is going on about nannies and au pairs, because they're upstanding citizens like that.
Clearly, the transition to a post industrial economy has been bad for birthrates everywhere. But, also, the population of many of these places doubled in living memory, while the political entities, "good jobs," and "good colleges" did not double. At least agricultural output more than doubled, so we don't have famine, but if we really want to sustain the current population level, we should probably have more top tier institutions, more cities, more high quality corporate jobs -- twice as much of the things people aspire to and work for. Apparently Georgia's population sank by a million from 1993, and is about the same as 1960. Mongolia's rose, but the country still has fewer people than the Phoenix metro area.
Except among the 40% of the country which supports him, I suppose.
It's very plausible that Trump can raise their TFR by somehow making babies higher status among that subset. It doesn't seem like he will actually do this, obviously, but it doesn't seem like there's any reason he can't.
Most of my immediate family voted for Trump, but I'm still having trouble imagining anything he says or does increasing the social status of parents.
I guess if he actually succeeded at revitalizing jobs by which a man of modest ability can support a family of five. But even among the evangelicals and Christian homeschoolers of my youth that ship had already sailed, and the families with decent status needed the father to be an engineer at least, so that he could support his six children and still go on retreats that cost some amount of money, and send his wife and children likewise. Several of my friends also have at least three children and may have voted for Trump, and I still feel like if we got awards we would all laugh and think "that's so weird."
But you have several children in an environment where you're bucking the trend. Maybe such a recognition would be more aimed at encouraging people like me (one and done) to have more? Wouldn't have worked. I know my limits. But I know folks who wavered on the second/third who might have been budged by messaging that doing so was "good" in some way. I wonder though if making access to fertility treatments cheaper/easier might not work more if you want more kids. While having kids younger would make some of that less necessary, at our current state of later marriages and child bearing, it has to play a significant role.
Yeah. I had a second partly because I wanted someone to eventually play with my older daughter. But I'm living in a 2500 sq ft mobile home on a half acre, with a wagon/SUV that fits three child car seats already, so have different costs/benefits than someone in a dense city with expensive housing.
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