A Way to Think About Falling Birth Rates

Commentary

The hardest and most provocative article to write is one that takes on a huge topic on which everyone has an opinion and yet comes to no conclusion. This is what Louise Perry has done with her piece “Falling Birth Rates Are a Mystery.” She explained how she thought she had the whole puzzle figured out until the data did not cooperate with her theory. She spent the rest of her article explaining why other theories don’t check out either.

I tried this out among friends, just throwing out the problem of falling birth rates and seeking answers. Every person present had an explanation. Birth control and abortion. Falling household wealth or the opposite, rising wealth. Low fertility due to pharmaceuticals. Materialism. Late marriage. Family insecurity due to divorce. Falling home ownership. Loss of faith. Men who don’t do housework. Lack of childcare. Fears of climate change. Educational expenses. Pessimism generally.

Tick through the list one by one. They all seem to be reasonable explanations and perhaps partially true. But as Perry wrote, each explanation has a contrary example somewhere in the world. And here’s the thing: Birth rates are falling the world over, regardless of religion, ideology, the presence or absence of abortion, the average age of marriage, and so on.

As a contrary example to conservatives’ theories, for instance, Iran is a low-fertility country. Between 1980 and 2000, Iran had the largest and fastest fall in fertility ever recorded. This is a deeply religious country in which women are veiled, and homosexuality is criminalized. And yet, fertility has collapsed.

It’s not the age of marriage either. In Turkey, people still get married in their early 20s, and yet birth rates have tumbled regardless. It’s not the childcare problem. In Nordic countries that provide free childcare to everyone, it’s exactly the same: less children, not more.

And it’s not abortion either. In Malta and Poland, abortion is strictly forbidden by law, and yet birth rates in both countries have hit rock bottom.

The claim that tough economic times—“We cannot afford children”—are causing the fall doesn’t hold up against historical data. Birth rates in most countries were far higher before most households had washing machines and even indoor plumbing. By any standard, most people in the world are vastly more materially prosperous than they were a century ago, and yet birth rates have fallen.

Has prosperity spoiled us?

Our writer concluded, “The truth is that we don’t really know what is going on, and we certainly don’t know when the fertility decline might end.”

Of course, I won’t let the discussion end there. I would like to suggest another broad framework to understand this. It’s a simple insight drawn from economics. A household seeks to maximize assets and minimize liabilities long-term. You would rather have money in the accounts working for you rather than loans you are servicing at interest. You would rather have money owed to you than a debt you have to pay. It’s a simple matter of a ledger, that glorious accounting tool that shaped modernity itself.

Are children today assets or liabilities? The answer is obvious. They are liabilities in a material sense, even if they bring great joy. A child can cost the typical household a half-million dollars over 20 years, double that if you include private school, private lessons in music and dance, camps, vacations, trips, clubs, equipment, college expenses, first-home deposits, and other factors. Add in the opportunity costs of lost income and professional advancements foregone, and the expenses only rise from there.

This is a brutal fact. And there is more to the story. There is near-zero cultural expectation that children have any sort of moral and financial obligation to care for their parents in their older years. Hardly a thought is put into that problem at all today, simply because we have vast social programs to cover income and medical care. Most people don’t even think about this issue today, so that reason to bear children has mostly disappeared.

You might think that this has always been true. Not so. Children in most places and most times in history fell on the other side of the ledger as assets, not liabilities. They worked in the home and on the farm. They were free labor for the household in times when agriculture and the home were the core of the productive unit. When opportunities became available outside the home—in factories, steamships, or other merchants in town—the children were out earning income from an early age.

Something about this subject makes people wince today, but it was not all salt-mine cruelty. It was a matter of holding down jobs in an adult world, even while pursuing studies in school as time allowed. This was true in the United States all throughout the second half of the 19th century. The barons of the Gilded Age were all thrilled to recount their childhood experiences on barges, factory floors, and the back office. They all provided income to the household while learning skills.

I think of my mother’s grandmother, born in the 1910s, who grew up in Texas in a farming and ranching family that was neither rich nor desperately poor. She married young and bore 12 children, not entirely unusual for the times. In the Great Depression, times were horrible for everyone, but the kids were the assets on the farm. They did it all and made survival possible. They prospered and used every saved dime to buy more land.

One generation later, this entirely changed. None of her children ever had more than three kids. Still, with 12 children, each with up to three kids plus their children, family reunions when I was a boy were mass events in which the family would rent out an entire campground. Consistent with the family ethic, family reunions were not for play but work; we spent the entire time shelling peas and pecans.

What changed? In the mid-1930s, the two most significant laws in U.S. history to affect family size and structure hit at once. So-called child labor was banned, while compulsory schooling was instituted. No more adventure in the real world. Instead, they must be chained to desks and listen to teachers for a decade. At about the same time, Congress passed the Social Security Act, designed to provide income to the elderly. That’s what broke the generational ethic that children should be prepared to care for their elderly parents.

There you have it: a one-two punch. Children were no longer permitted to bring in value on the front end or prepare for growing earning power throughout their teens, and they were no longer expected to return investment at the end of life either.

Other factors, such as urbanization, increased mobility, and cultural changes, contribute both as causes and effects. Regardless, that was the turning point at which children became net economic liabilities to the household, so it should hardly surprise anyone that there are fewer of them produced.

It was not just in the United States. Similar changes were made all over the world, especially in the developed world. Childhood changed. Adulthood changed. Life for the elderly changed.

You can agree or disagree with these legal changes in how the family is organized, how the welfare state works, and the best age at which the young begin remunerative work. No matter one’s opinion, there is no denying that this was a fundamental shift. Children went from being lifetime assets to becoming lifetime liabilities in an economic sense.

None of this is to take away the spiritual and familial value of children and family: Those are infinite. But practical considerations matter, too.

Is this the whole explanation? Surely not. But it is a broad framework worth considering as we seek answers.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.