How to Raise Birth Rates

I had a post on the subject a few months ago; a recent online discussion started me thinking about it again and I have some new ideas. One was due to a poster whose list of ways government could reduce the birth rate included banning divorce. I suspected he had it backwards. The obvious reason to think that is that modern societies have both easy divorce and low birth rates.

But correlation is not causation; there are other plausible reasons for low birth rates, some discussed in my earlier post. There are better reasons.

Marriage is a serious, often life changing, step; some people might be unwilling to take it if the other party was free to back out later; willingness to marry is a stronger signal of intent to stay married if divorce is not an option, one reason eliminating or restricting divorce might result in more people getting married. If that seems wrong to you, consider the effect on the mortgage market of a legal change that made it easy for borrowers to default.

Producing a child is much riskier if you are not sure the marriage will last, so making divorce more difficult might also make married couples more willing to have children, a second reason to expect it to raise birth rates. The shift in US states to no fault divorce seems to have been associated with a mild decline in birth rates, which is at least a little evidence for such an effect.

Other Ways

Another way of increasing the birth rate would be to legalize the adoption market. Currently, the cost of adopting a healthy baby is from $40,000 to $85,000, paid to various middlemen. Some women who get pregnant might choose to bear the child rather than aborting it if they could get paid to do so.

One biotech possibility is developing ways of converting other cells into eggs and sperm. That would allow ff and mm couples and older women to have children. Add artificial wombs and most of the biological cost is gone.

Another approach would be to improve mate search. Fifty or sixty years ago I expected computer technology to make it easier to find a compatible mate just as it makes it easier to find books or articles or the fastest route to where you are going; for reasons I do not entirely understand, that has not happened. One possible explanation is that while computer dating made it easier to find a spouse it also made it easier to find a partner for casual sex and the increased availability of casual sex reduced the incentive for marriage.

Law and custom could change to make search easier. Currently there are substantial barriers to prevent dating among fellow employees; dating among fellow students is permitted, between professors and their students mostly not.¹ These are all contexts where people get the sort of information about each other relevant for mate search. There are obviously potential conflicts of interest if a professor dates a student he grades or an executive his secretary, other problems if a breakup clutters classroom or office with an inconvenient emotional residue. But relaxing such restrictions should increase marriage rates.

One thing that affects the willingness to have children is the cost of rearing them; there are a possible changes in law or custom that might reduce those costs. One is a shift away from helicopter parenting. I occasionally see news stories where parents have been questioned by the authorities for letting their children do things, such as walking to school by themselves, that the parents did when they were children. Less of that might mean more parents willing to let their children entertain themselves instead of requiring constant, and expensive, adult supervision.

Other legally or socially enforced requirements on parents affect the cost of being one. An example is the rule specifying up to what age and/or height a child requires a car seat; that varies by state, currently ranges from five to ten years, often with an additional height restriction. The higher the age, the more likely it is that a third child requires three car seats and a larger car to fit them in.

I have not been the parent of a small child for a very long time. If I was I would probably be familiar with other costly requirements and have opinions on which of them I approved of.

The Darwinian Solution

Humans vary in, among other things, their taste for having children. It seems likely that some of that variation is genetic. We are now in an environment where reproductive success is limited mainly by parental choice not resource constraints; most people in developed societies could afford to rear many more children than they do. So people with more of a taste for having children, those who are more phyloprogenitive, will out-reproduce those who are less, increasing the share of their descendants in the population and, eventually, bringing average birth rates back up. The process should continue until reproductive success is again constrained by resources, a Darwinian version of Malthus’ old argument for why a society rich enough so that the cost of children was low could not be in long term equilibrium.

It is a persuasive argument but there are problems with it. Human generations are long so human evolution is slow. If we maintained the world more or less as it is for five or ten generations, fertility rates might begin to rise but we are not going to maintain the world more or less as it is for that long; we live in a time of rapid change driven by technological progress.

That makes all long term predictions highly uncertain, one of the reasons I am skeptical of expensive precautions intended to prevent long term consequences of global warming or anything else.

Fertility, Religion and Politics

More religious people tend to have more children, both across societies and within societies. The tendency to religious belief may be in part genetic and heritable; whether or not it is, children tend to follow their parents religion. While religious belief, like fertility, as declining at present, that might be reversed by the greater fertility of believers.

That argument too has problems. The selective reproduction of the religious might be balanced by selective conversion in the other direction, on net away from religion. Technological change might produce reproductive technologies, cloning for example, less acceptable to the more religious.

Conservatives tend to be more religious than average and have higher birth rates, so a similar argument applies there; the same problems apply. Biological evolution might be outweighed by memetic evolution in the other direction, arguably what has been happening in the U.S. over the past century. An online acquaintance, conservative and Catholic, who expects his opponents to breed themselves out of existence may be being optimistic; it has not been happening so far.

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[1] The woman I have been married to for the past forty-three years was a grad student and I a professor when we met, but fortunately in different departments.

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