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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 think people are still in willful denial about how much the unforced costs of childrearing have increased in the past decades. Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore). Starting around age 7, I would spend large stretches of the day home alone, or playing outside (in the streets, or the abandoned gravel pit beyond our housing development) alone or with any number of neighbourhood kids who were also outside unsupervised or could be easily summoned by just walking up to their apartment block and ringing the doorbell. (Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries.) If I needed something from my parents, I would take the bus into town to find them at work (another CPS case?), where they would probably get me some food at the university cafeteria and then drive me home (in a way that is no longer legal, since Germany now mandates child seats in cars up until age 12 (!?)). I got into a good free public school just based on an admissions exam, and into a series of very good universities just on strength of grades and math/science olympiad participation; nowadays I gather you have no chance without an array of eclectic extracurriculars that also need to be found, organised and paid for by your parents. As a result of this increase in safetyism and credentialism, I now see little possibility to raise children and give them remotely as good a life as I had without investing a much larger fraction of my money and time than my parents (really: my single mother and her series of boyfriends) had to for me.
"Status" is only relevant insofar as I think it would both be low-status to raise kids that are obviously miserable and have no prospects, and we would also coincidentally have to sacrifice other things that convey us status (like having full-time academic jobs) to make it not so. To overcome this, you wouldn't just need to fix some putative recent drop in the status conveyed by parenthood; rather, you would need to socially engineer a status reward for it that exceeds all the novel status penalties, which would require entirely new and hypothetical types of machinery. To roll back the cost increase seems like a hopeless ambition - while there may be groups of people (especially here) who could be convinced to oppose the credentialism ratchet, the consensus for safetyism is entrenched to the point that the tribes mostly wage war against each other in the language of harms and dangers that their opponents have not done enough to address.
This made me wonder how many American TV series with multigenerational non-Hispanic White households I could come up with. And the number is... zero? The protagonist of Hey, Arnold is an orphan who has to live with his grandparents.
Chris Hansen'sJim Henson's Dinosaurs weren't dinosaurs ofcolorquadrupedality, so I guess they should count?The Waltons (of course)
Mama's Family (very dysfunctional, but happy families make bad sitcoms)
ChatGPT suggested The Waltons as well, but it's a series from the seventies about the Great Depression. Are there really no series about the Great Recession instead, with a Millennial couple forced to start a family in the same house one of them grew up in?
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