You should probably also mention ever-increasing standards for child rearing, particularly in countries like the US, making merely "adequate" provision for one's children increasingly expensive in both time and money.
Part of the puzzle is that whatever is happening seems tp be happening almost everywhere. That fits improved contraception or rising incomes but I am not sure what else.
I'm not sure that rising incomes are present everywhere. In the presence of changes to inequality, you can't approximate changes in income by looking at changes in average income. The average doesn't have children.
But I wouldn't have a clue how to find out whether e.g. the bottom 70% were poorer even while the top 30%, and the average, was richer - particularly if I wanted the same answer for every nation, or better yet even smaller units.
Also, while I'm not sure whether child rearing standards are going up anywhere but in the US, I'm also not sure that they are not going up just about everywhere. (This is a potentially answerable question, but not easy to answer.)
One crude measure is calories per capita, which I believe has been increasing almost everywhere. Global rates of extreme poverty have gone down a lot. That doesn't imply everywhere but it is a measure of how badly the bottom is doing that pretty much ignores rich countries.
The puzzle of fertility is that rising male incomes increase it and rising female incomes reduce it.
Measures or household income to fertility are also flawed because fertility reduces income. Specifically, female income. Women face a tradeoff between having more kids and raising more kids, there is only so much time and energy in a day. When we notice that higher household income doesn't result in more kids, that is mostly because women with fewer kids have more income.
If we isolate only on male income, its a positive correlation. In other words, the more money a man makes the easier a tradeoff the wife faces between income and more children.
If we could disentangle assortive mating from this (high earning men marrying women capable of high earnings) I think it would be even stronger. Female income isn't bad in and of itself, it probably even allows for more options if it can outpace cost of childcare. Only if it causes one to choose income over child rearing is it problematic.
The solution is pretty clear. We need big payroll tax breaks for parents (by definition, taxes will have to rise on non-parents). This should scale with kids and income, Box 3 on your W2 * X% per kid. If married filing jointly both parents should get the tax break. We simply acknowledge that the costs of raising children are a form of "payroll tax" being born by parents and we shouldn't "double tax" parents.
Low fertility people will have to pay more payroll taxes to support those that are having the kids that will support them in old age. It's only fair. End the free riding.
At the correct scale this will work. Nobody in the world is really trying anything at any kind of scale that matters, and many of the child subsidies have terrible incentive structures (hungary's is pretty bad for instance).
Fertility increasing with male income and decreasing with female would make sense even if you had a measure of female earning power that wasn't affected by fertility, as long as the time cost of bearing children was born mostly by the mother.
1) Atomization of the extended family and post-industrial familial diaspora makes it more difficult to have proximate child rearing assistance that is truly loving, so having children has become more intimidating and therefore less desirable.
2) Childhood mortality has plummeted. The trend chart of childhood mortality looks almost exactly like the trend chart of fertility. In ye olden days, to be sure that enough of your children would survive that they would have enough children to survive, etc, you had to have a LOT of children. At least a few of the children you brought into the world needed to bring children of their own into the world for you to be confident that your genes would live on. For you to have three children become parents, you needed to have at least four or five be born, and even if you had that many, there was a decent chance you'd lose most of them, so you really needed to have seven or more to be reasonably confident that three might someday have children of their own. Nowadays, literally 99% of children born survive to adulthood, so if you have just one child, the pressure to have more has meaningfully evaporated.
3) School pushes back age of marriage for everyone, including women, and a woman's age at marriage is an exceptionally good predictor of how many children she'll have. I am an example: I am the youngest of four, my mother got married at 21, had her first child at 23, and her last at 33.
P.S. "Artificial wombs" 🤮
P.P.S. Your point about evolution/the Amish is a good one. The future belongs to those who show up. Antihumanists are least likely to have children. Pronatalists are most likely to have them.
To me, the Afghan example would seem to strongly indicate that the main cause is technological progress with regards to birth control rather than any social change taking place mainly in Western countries. This is also the explanation with the most straight-forward causality, and it is also the least useful explanation for people with a political axe to grind (except Luddites, I suppose).
As for the cure, as far as I can tell, social engineering tends to turn out worse than the disease, so I'd prefer laissez faire. But I do see a potential problem there of liberal societies being outbred by illiberal ones – e.g. what happens if South Korea ends up with a population of 10M and North Korea with one of 100M?
New angle on falling birthrates: growing fundamental cultural dividision between young people evident from huge diversion between young women and young men's political viewpoints. See German post-election surveys.
The default assumption here seems to be that having fewer children is a choice, made primarily by women. I wonder how much this is true now, as opposed to in the 1960s when reliable hormonal birth control came into use.
To what extent is the birth dearth a result of a conscious choice to have few or no children, and how much is the physical inability to have them? A couple marrying in their 30s may want 4 children but be unable to have them, or have any.
There is choice involved, to delay marriage, to use birth control while young, to have a job. Many of my co-workers are women in their 30s, who seem to be popping out babies as fast as they can. Others are women in their 20s, who mostly are not.
The choice by women seems to be delaying making a commitment to a stable married life until the late 20s and 30s, in spite of a desire to have children. Not having children is downstream and a not necessarily desired outcome.
There is evidence that hormonal birth control alters emotions and thinking of women.
The Ponzi scheme element of Medicare/Medicaid in the US is self-limiting, like all Ponzi schemes. I observe it in the UK with our NHS. The waiting room, both physical and virtual, in our GP surgeries and hospitals grows ever larger. Rationing by queuing is the well known effect. And many older folk will simply die while queuing. Less improvement in life expectancy or actual falls is the visible result.
As it happens I have a chapter on the general form of that problem: "What Does Optimum Population Mean?" Research in Population Economics, Vol. III (1981), Eds. Simon and Lindert. It's linked to my academic page: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Academic.html
> If people who are in favor of children have them and people against having children don’t, an increasing fraction of the population will be descended from the first group.
I have a feeling just being in favor does not help. You actually need to find a mate to be able to agree to it. I wonder if it is harder for such people to find a mate compared to someone who wants just 1 child.
If fertility decline is a bad thing, as you suggest it is a market failure, and if AI and medical advancements do not adequately compensate for this market failure, then wouldn't this imply that we should be more receptive to immigration? In the past the US economy was strengthened by the influx of immigrants to the workforce. Has something changed so that it should now be a priority to discourage immigration?
Just for amusement I ask my daughter today over lunch "Neither you nor any of your friends are pregnant. In fact you haven't had a single teenage pregnancy in your entire school of 1200 in four years. What would it take to get you all pregnant?" (granted could be some unknown abortions; also all as in "you all", not "all")
After some jokes and brainstorming, was a long two hour lunch, her answer was "nothing". She was like "well you could bribe a couple of them into surrogacy, i.e. half million and acceptance into a college of their choice" but other than that, she basically said it's a status /culture thing. They are empowered and successful which in her words meant independent, single, jobs, and friends without husbands while children were frowned upon as oppressive and domesticated considered repulsive.
The other thing people miss though it's well documented, is sex itself is falling post Gen X; not just in lifetime partners but as in raw absolute number of times as well even with a partner. Likewise we actively prevent and stigmatize childhood sex play and tween sexual exploration, a human norm that leads to healthy views of sex into adulthood. When people (i.e. mostly women) no longer enjoy sex, find it creepy, or outright revolting and men are scared to have sex because we keep putting them in prison for it or destroying their lives fighting it, fertility will suffer as ....well it's dependent on actually having sex generally speaking. You look at places like Japan and it's not just a childless culture, it's a sexless one too.
Modern society has basically become the equivalent of religiosity replacing religion but with sex (I can't think of a similar word here), i.e. the trappings of sex are everywhere in public but in private no one actually having it or cares.. It's something no one is talking about but they should as in "how do we convince more 'kids' to have sex" because increased children will flow from that naturally as even the best BC has a fail rate.
I have some calculations on philoprogenitive groups at https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/explaining-falling-birth-rates. Assuming population growth rates don't change, in a century there will be about 10 million Amish, 20 million Haredi. Mormons are growing much more slowly but from a much larger base; if their growth continues that will outnumber Amish+Haredi.
Very interesting, thanks for the link! Seems likely some kind of big shuffle like this will happen in the next few centuries, at least until genetic engineering or societal change can correct the bug.
You say: “A decline in the working population would produce an increase in the price of labor, a decrease in the return on capital, making the old worse off.”
Yes, if capital per capita (k) increases, the price of labor (w) increases, and the return on capital (r) falls. But (with a classical production function) the income from capital (rk) increases and the old ones are not worse.
1) The pill. Women have individual control of reproduction.
2) On the unmechanized farm, children were an asset. Currently they are expensive critters of negative financial value to parents.
3) Decrease in childhood mortality makes having a “spare” child less important.
4) Women are able to work in the monetized sector but motherhood is remains in unmonetized.
If you want more kids, consider an application of the 100% land “tax” proposed by Henry George - abolish private land ownership, replace it with rent paid by the highest bidder, and pay the rent to mothers in proportion to the number of their children.
Your 2 raises a question I didn't go into in the post. Mechanization makes physical strength less important. Why didn't that increase job opportunities for children as well as for women?
Subsidizing the production of children was one of the options I listed.
Henry George's proposal was only for the site value of land.
Older women having children have an increasing chance of abnormal babies, that grow into hugely draining (of resources), ever-dependent, adults. It's not so neat extending child-birthing years, maybe even a net negative.
Thank you for joining with those of us who recognize that the (old age) welfare state is a major explanatory factor in fertility declines, imo second only to contraception (with lucrative female labor force participation ease obviously very high up there as well, though I’d argue this is a steeper phenomenon for the upper 30% than for the entire population).
It is not a coincidence that “childless cat ladies” (i.e. unmarried women) are by far the biggest supporters of the party of the welfare state.
One possible partial solution to the interrelated problems of funding our Ponzi SS/Medicare system and TFR would be to introduce more appropriate incentives into our old-age welfare programs.
Have SS benefits (and Medicare premiums owed) be partly a function of how many children you produce (split appropriately across birthed and raised to adulthood).
Bringing two future taxpaying children into the world/country would be the baseline; the amount of your benefits are increased with more than 2, decreased for only one, and decreased further for zero.
It's confusing to me how the corners of the discourse most anxious about fertility rates are also the ones most aware of UBI debates, elite overproduction theory, woke excesses in the PMC, etc.
If we anticipate soon having more poor people than we have any use for, and we already have way more middle-class people than we have any use for (as shown by rising numbers of reviled HR busybodies, grifting NGO priesthoods and Starbucks baristas with psychology degrees, replication crises in the sciences and administrative bloat in the state), then what is the mechanism by which we think we can just pour large quantities of generic children into the future and have value come out the other end?
You seem to be assuming that the people we have no use for are a result of a shortage of things to be done rather than of a badly functioning incentive system controlling what people end up doing.
Well, ok, *maybe* there are lots of valuable, remunerative tasks out there and existing labor is just misallocated. I mean, I can't easily imagine what remaining high-value tasks we'd need our HR workshop people and ex-coal-miners to do. And I feel like the labor market is still free enough that if those jobs existed, people would find a way to fill them. But ok.
However, even supposing that your point about incentives is true, does it really change the bad calculus of destroying present utility to ensure a higher-fertility future? If you look around and see corn rotting unharvested in the fields, I don't think it matters whether the problem is that the corn is inedible or that it's fine and they just don't have a good way to harvest it. Either way, I think you need to figure out what's up with the existing corn before you can reasonably expect a lot of value from additional planting.
You should probably also mention ever-increasing standards for child rearing, particularly in countries like the US, making merely "adequate" provision for one's children increasingly expensive in both time and money.
Why do you think that is happening? In how wide a variety of countries?
I have no idea why, or how widespread this is, or even whether it takes different forms in different countries.
Part of the puzzle is that whatever is happening seems tp be happening almost everywhere. That fits improved contraception or rising incomes but I am not sure what else.
I'm not sure that rising incomes are present everywhere. In the presence of changes to inequality, you can't approximate changes in income by looking at changes in average income. The average doesn't have children.
But I wouldn't have a clue how to find out whether e.g. the bottom 70% were poorer even while the top 30%, and the average, was richer - particularly if I wanted the same answer for every nation, or better yet even smaller units.
Also, while I'm not sure whether child rearing standards are going up anywhere but in the US, I'm also not sure that they are not going up just about everywhere. (This is a potentially answerable question, but not easy to answer.)
One crude measure is calories per capita, which I believe has been increasing almost everywhere. Global rates of extreme poverty have gone down a lot. That doesn't imply everywhere but it is a measure of how badly the bottom is doing that pretty much ignores rich countries.
Infertility increased as vaccines increased..
The puzzle of fertility is that rising male incomes increase it and rising female incomes reduce it.
Measures or household income to fertility are also flawed because fertility reduces income. Specifically, female income. Women face a tradeoff between having more kids and raising more kids, there is only so much time and energy in a day. When we notice that higher household income doesn't result in more kids, that is mostly because women with fewer kids have more income.
If we isolate only on male income, its a positive correlation. In other words, the more money a man makes the easier a tradeoff the wife faces between income and more children.
If we could disentangle assortive mating from this (high earning men marrying women capable of high earnings) I think it would be even stronger. Female income isn't bad in and of itself, it probably even allows for more options if it can outpace cost of childcare. Only if it causes one to choose income over child rearing is it problematic.
The solution is pretty clear. We need big payroll tax breaks for parents (by definition, taxes will have to rise on non-parents). This should scale with kids and income, Box 3 on your W2 * X% per kid. If married filing jointly both parents should get the tax break. We simply acknowledge that the costs of raising children are a form of "payroll tax" being born by parents and we shouldn't "double tax" parents.
Low fertility people will have to pay more payroll taxes to support those that are having the kids that will support them in old age. It's only fair. End the free riding.
At the correct scale this will work. Nobody in the world is really trying anything at any kind of scale that matters, and many of the child subsidies have terrible incentive structures (hungary's is pretty bad for instance).
Fertility increasing with male income and decreasing with female would make sense even if you had a measure of female earning power that wasn't affected by fertility, as long as the time cost of bearing children was born mostly by the mother.
Some additional/related explanations/thoughts:
1) Atomization of the extended family and post-industrial familial diaspora makes it more difficult to have proximate child rearing assistance that is truly loving, so having children has become more intimidating and therefore less desirable.
2) Childhood mortality has plummeted. The trend chart of childhood mortality looks almost exactly like the trend chart of fertility. In ye olden days, to be sure that enough of your children would survive that they would have enough children to survive, etc, you had to have a LOT of children. At least a few of the children you brought into the world needed to bring children of their own into the world for you to be confident that your genes would live on. For you to have three children become parents, you needed to have at least four or five be born, and even if you had that many, there was a decent chance you'd lose most of them, so you really needed to have seven or more to be reasonably confident that three might someday have children of their own. Nowadays, literally 99% of children born survive to adulthood, so if you have just one child, the pressure to have more has meaningfully evaporated.
3) School pushes back age of marriage for everyone, including women, and a woman's age at marriage is an exceptionally good predictor of how many children she'll have. I am an example: I am the youngest of four, my mother got married at 21, had her first child at 23, and her last at 33.
P.S. "Artificial wombs" 🤮
P.P.S. Your point about evolution/the Amish is a good one. The future belongs to those who show up. Antihumanists are least likely to have children. Pronatalists are most likely to have them.
> P.S. "Artificial wombs" 🤮
Agreed. I'm always amazed by how many people don't realize that artificial wombs would turn humans Eusocial.
To me, the Afghan example would seem to strongly indicate that the main cause is technological progress with regards to birth control rather than any social change taking place mainly in Western countries. This is also the explanation with the most straight-forward causality, and it is also the least useful explanation for people with a political axe to grind (except Luddites, I suppose).
As for the cure, as far as I can tell, social engineering tends to turn out worse than the disease, so I'd prefer laissez faire. But I do see a potential problem there of liberal societies being outbred by illiberal ones – e.g. what happens if South Korea ends up with a population of 10M and North Korea with one of 100M?
New angle on falling birthrates: growing fundamental cultural dividision between young people evident from huge diversion between young women and young men's political viewpoints. See German post-election surveys.
The default assumption here seems to be that having fewer children is a choice, made primarily by women. I wonder how much this is true now, as opposed to in the 1960s when reliable hormonal birth control came into use.
To what extent is the birth dearth a result of a conscious choice to have few or no children, and how much is the physical inability to have them? A couple marrying in their 30s may want 4 children but be unable to have them, or have any.
There is choice involved, to delay marriage, to use birth control while young, to have a job. Many of my co-workers are women in their 30s, who seem to be popping out babies as fast as they can. Others are women in their 20s, who mostly are not.
The choice by women seems to be delaying making a commitment to a stable married life until the late 20s and 30s, in spite of a desire to have children. Not having children is downstream and a not necessarily desired outcome.
There is evidence that hormonal birth control alters emotions and thinking of women.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6838021/
I speculate that constant exposure to female hormones also alters male emotions and thinking.
The Ponzi scheme element of Medicare/Medicaid in the US is self-limiting, like all Ponzi schemes. I observe it in the UK with our NHS. The waiting room, both physical and virtual, in our GP surgeries and hospitals grows ever larger. Rationing by queuing is the well known effect. And many older folk will simply die while queuing. Less improvement in life expectancy or actual falls is the visible result.
The main problem of having fewer people is that there will be fewer lives lived. Lives are good!
That is a reason for utilitarians who are maximizing total utility. I think people are more likely to be moved by perceived threats to themselves.
How do you make the tradeoff between marginally more people living marginally worse lives?
As it happens I have a chapter on the general form of that problem: "What Does Optimum Population Mean?" Research in Population Economics, Vol. III (1981), Eds. Simon and Lindert. It's linked to my academic page: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Academic.html
> If people who are in favor of children have them and people against having children don’t, an increasing fraction of the population will be descended from the first group.
I have a feeling just being in favor does not help. You actually need to find a mate to be able to agree to it. I wonder if it is harder for such people to find a mate compared to someone who wants just 1 child.
If fertility decline is a bad thing, as you suggest it is a market failure, and if AI and medical advancements do not adequately compensate for this market failure, then wouldn't this imply that we should be more receptive to immigration? In the past the US economy was strengthened by the influx of immigrants to the workforce. Has something changed so that it should now be a priority to discourage immigration?
Just for amusement I ask my daughter today over lunch "Neither you nor any of your friends are pregnant. In fact you haven't had a single teenage pregnancy in your entire school of 1200 in four years. What would it take to get you all pregnant?" (granted could be some unknown abortions; also all as in "you all", not "all")
After some jokes and brainstorming, was a long two hour lunch, her answer was "nothing". She was like "well you could bribe a couple of them into surrogacy, i.e. half million and acceptance into a college of their choice" but other than that, she basically said it's a status /culture thing. They are empowered and successful which in her words meant independent, single, jobs, and friends without husbands while children were frowned upon as oppressive and domesticated considered repulsive.
The other thing people miss though it's well documented, is sex itself is falling post Gen X; not just in lifetime partners but as in raw absolute number of times as well even with a partner. Likewise we actively prevent and stigmatize childhood sex play and tween sexual exploration, a human norm that leads to healthy views of sex into adulthood. When people (i.e. mostly women) no longer enjoy sex, find it creepy, or outright revolting and men are scared to have sex because we keep putting them in prison for it or destroying their lives fighting it, fertility will suffer as ....well it's dependent on actually having sex generally speaking. You look at places like Japan and it's not just a childless culture, it's a sexless one too.
Modern society has basically become the equivalent of religiosity replacing religion but with sex (I can't think of a similar word here), i.e. the trappings of sex are everywhere in public but in private no one actually having it or cares.. It's something no one is talking about but they should as in "how do we convince more 'kids' to have sex" because increased children will flow from that naturally as even the best BC has a fail rate.
The amish will inherit the earth. They're the ones showing up
I have some calculations on philoprogenitive groups at https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/explaining-falling-birth-rates. Assuming population growth rates don't change, in a century there will be about 10 million Amish, 20 million Haredi. Mormons are growing much more slowly but from a much larger base; if their growth continues that will outnumber Amish+Haredi.
The problem with these kinds of analyses is they turn into a game of "which derivative does one keep constant".
Very interesting, thanks for the link! Seems likely some kind of big shuffle like this will happen in the next few centuries, at least until genetic engineering or societal change can correct the bug.
You say: “A decline in the working population would produce an increase in the price of labor, a decrease in the return on capital, making the old worse off.”
Yes, if capital per capita (k) increases, the price of labor (w) increases, and the return on capital (r) falls. But (with a classical production function) the income from capital (rk) increases and the old ones are not worse.
Uh…
You might well be correct that old people with capital are not worse off.
But old people expecting younger people to pay for their Ponzi-scheme old-age benefits definitively are worse off.
In a pay-as-you-go pension system, yes, but not necessarily in capitalization.
Why? Quick thoughts.
1) The pill. Women have individual control of reproduction.
2) On the unmechanized farm, children were an asset. Currently they are expensive critters of negative financial value to parents.
3) Decrease in childhood mortality makes having a “spare” child less important.
4) Women are able to work in the monetized sector but motherhood is remains in unmonetized.
If you want more kids, consider an application of the 100% land “tax” proposed by Henry George - abolish private land ownership, replace it with rent paid by the highest bidder, and pay the rent to mothers in proportion to the number of their children.
Your 2 raises a question I didn't go into in the post. Mechanization makes physical strength less important. Why didn't that increase job opportunities for children as well as for women?
Subsidizing the production of children was one of the options I listed.
Henry George's proposal was only for the site value of land.
Older women having children have an increasing chance of abnormal babies, that grow into hugely draining (of resources), ever-dependent, adults. It's not so neat extending child-birthing years, maybe even a net negative.
If you extend them by slowing aging that may slow the effects that produce that outcome.
Thank you for joining with those of us who recognize that the (old age) welfare state is a major explanatory factor in fertility declines, imo second only to contraception (with lucrative female labor force participation ease obviously very high up there as well, though I’d argue this is a steeper phenomenon for the upper 30% than for the entire population).
It is not a coincidence that “childless cat ladies” (i.e. unmarried women) are by far the biggest supporters of the party of the welfare state.
One possible partial solution to the interrelated problems of funding our Ponzi SS/Medicare system and TFR would be to introduce more appropriate incentives into our old-age welfare programs.
Have SS benefits (and Medicare premiums owed) be partly a function of how many children you produce (split appropriately across birthed and raised to adulthood).
Bringing two future taxpaying children into the world/country would be the baseline; the amount of your benefits are increased with more than 2, decreased for only one, and decreased further for zero.
It's confusing to me how the corners of the discourse most anxious about fertility rates are also the ones most aware of UBI debates, elite overproduction theory, woke excesses in the PMC, etc.
If we anticipate soon having more poor people than we have any use for, and we already have way more middle-class people than we have any use for (as shown by rising numbers of reviled HR busybodies, grifting NGO priesthoods and Starbucks baristas with psychology degrees, replication crises in the sciences and administrative bloat in the state), then what is the mechanism by which we think we can just pour large quantities of generic children into the future and have value come out the other end?
You seem to be assuming that the people we have no use for are a result of a shortage of things to be done rather than of a badly functioning incentive system controlling what people end up doing.
Well, ok, *maybe* there are lots of valuable, remunerative tasks out there and existing labor is just misallocated. I mean, I can't easily imagine what remaining high-value tasks we'd need our HR workshop people and ex-coal-miners to do. And I feel like the labor market is still free enough that if those jobs existed, people would find a way to fill them. But ok.
However, even supposing that your point about incentives is true, does it really change the bad calculus of destroying present utility to ensure a higher-fertility future? If you look around and see corn rotting unharvested in the fields, I don't think it matters whether the problem is that the corn is inedible or that it's fine and they just don't have a good way to harvest it. Either way, I think you need to figure out what's up with the existing corn before you can reasonably expect a lot of value from additional planting.