What Might Push Fertility Back Up?

My previous post was on possible explanations for the decline in fertility in recent decades. That got me thinking about what future changes might reverse it. When I raised the question on my favorite online forum almost all of the responses were about what governments could do to push fertility up, which was not the question I was asking. The current decline was the result of changes, technological, social, perhaps ideological, not of governments deciding to push fertility down; it continued when many tried to push it up. My question is what changes might happen in the future with the opposite effect. My previous post mentioned one — selection for philoprogenitive cultures and individuals making them an increasing fraction of the population.

What might be others?

Technology

There are several ways in which technological change might make it less expensive to produce and rear children. One is artificial wombs. My first grandchild was very premature; if he had been born a decade or two earlier he would probably not have survived. His mother being unwilling to risk that again, his sister was born in India in a rented womb. Combine those two approaches into an artificial womb and one major cost of a child, nine months of pregnancy and permanent effects on the mother’s body, goes away. It is an old idea in science fiction, difficult but not necessarily impossible in the real world.

Once a child has been produced it still must be reared. The process at present is probably, for most parents, more expensive than it should be,¹ due to norms of child-rearing that require very extensive inputs of parental time and effort, but even a free range approach requires a lot. Are there possible future changes that would reduce it?

One could be artificial intelligence. For much of education a teacher could be replaced by intelligent software and it might be possible to automate some of the mechanics of child care, spotting an infant whose diaper needs to be changed or a child coming too close to a hot stove, leaving the parent free to pay attention to something else.

My guess is that there are limits to the process, that robot cuddling is not likely to be an adequate substitute for human cuddling, but AI might reduce the cost of child care indirectly. There are many jobs for which humans can be replaced with sufficiently smart computer programs, some for which  it is already happening. If it turns out that child care is one of the jobs that has to be done by humans it will be one of the professions that people displaced by automation can turn to. More people should mean lower costs.

Another change driven in part by technology is the shift to work from home. The immediate cause was the Covid pandemic; with that over some jobs have returned to the office but over the longer term the shift will probably continue due to technological changes that make the home a better substitute for the office than in the past. For many, perhaps most, jobs that use a computer a home computer, possibly a laptop, is an adequate substitute for an office computer, email and messaging for in-office communication. Humans prefer interacting with people they can see and hear, supplementing words with voice tones and facial expressions, but that can be to some degree provided at a distance by screens and speakers, better by virtual reality as it continues to improve.

How might that affect the cost of child rearing?

Much of the cost of child of child rearing is not time doing something but time being somewhere, available to deal with problems if they occur. A job done from home makes it easier to combine that sort of child rearing with paid employment. That has been an option in the past for a very limited set of jobs — writing books or grading papers for a course taught by mail. It is an option for more jobs now, will be for still more in the future.

The shift from office to home has two other relevant effects. It makes it easier for the employed partner in a one earner couple to assist with childcare, fill in when the other is on the toilet or the phone. It also makes it possible to live somewhere away from the dense urban core, somewhere where houses are larger and less expensive, possibly in a community better suited to families.

Social Change

My previous post discussed norms of courtship, status ranking, and the like as possible explanations for low birthrates. Those things might change. We have observed one religion/religion substitute, wokism, rise with startling speed, arguably in part to fill the hole left by the decline of conventional religions. There might be another and it might reverse some of the changes that led to the present situation.

Another possible cause of change is social, economic or political collapse. Current US fiscal policy, driven by the political attraction of increasing expenditure without increasing taxes, is probably unsustainable. Interest on the national debt is currently equal to about 15% of federal revenue. If the debt gets high enough for interest on federal securities to carry a significant risk premium that could easily double. At some point the government, unable to borrow enough to fund both the interest on debt and the current level of expenditure, would have to either default on the debt, explicitly or by inflating it away, or drastically cut expenditure. The resulting shock could produce substantial changes in the society, possibly including an increasing desire for the stability of family.

A second possible source of collapse is political. At the moment it looks as though political division is increasing to levels that might produce, if not literal civil war, the political equivalent, a polity where whichever faction gets control of government uses it to suppress its opponents, possibly with different factions controlling different governments, federal, state and city. Some of that is already happening but it could get worse, with the current rise of lawfare a worrying symptom.

Increasing the Value of Children

Part of the cost of having children is the risk that they might turn out wrong, part of the benefit that they might turn out right. We already have technologies, amniocentesis to detect the most serious genetic faults followed by selective abortion, that eliminate part of the risk, at least for couples willing to abort a defective fetus. We have another technology, in vitro fertilization, testing early stage embryos and selecting among them, that eliminate some additional risks and can, very slightly, raise the chance of desirable characteristics.

To do much more requires two additional technologies. The first is Heinlein’s old idea of separately selecting on egg and sperm — choosing the best among ten sperm and ten ova gives you a choice among a hundred combinations. We do not know how to do it yet but there is no obvious reason to think we will not be able to in the future.²

To take advantage of that technology require a better understanding of genetics, what combinations  of genes tend to produce health, intelligence, other desirable characteristics. If we knew enough about that a couple could select, from a hundred of the children they could produce which one they do produce, at which point being a parent becomes a safer gamble.

Forward to the Past

One traditional reason to have children is to provide for your old age, assure the existence in the future of people who care for you. That function has been in part replaced by Social Security and Medicare. Social Security cannot continue in its present form for much longer. Either it will change in ways that substantially reduce its value, such as raising the age for collecting it, reducing the amount, or introducing some form of means testing, or it will have to be funded in part out of other taxes, which may not be practical given other fiscal problems. If it is reduced, still more if it collapses, that will increase the importance of having children.

The state of Social Security is one symptom of a more general problem. Governments tend, for familiar reasons, to weight costs and benefits in the near future much more heavily than more distant ones, to have what economists describe as a high discount rate. In an expanding economy they can get away with it for a long time, can for example run social security as a Ponzi scheme, paying out more than people have paid in and relying on increasing population and income to keep it going. If that stops working, whether for social security or other programs, people may conclude that government cannot be relied on to protect them in the future and that they should invest in alternatives, including children.³

My examples are for the US but most of the argument applies to other developed countries as well.

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1. For arguments in support of that claim see Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids.

2. The critical idea is to take advantage of the fact that the mechanism for producing a sperm starts with a full set of genes, ends with a half set. Destructively analyze a random cell to get the full set, destructively analyze the body containing the other half, and subtract. Apply a similar but somewhat more complicated approach to the ova.

3. They could invest in pensions instead but a pension does not have a mind to figure out what sort of help an aging person needs, help him navigate a world he may no longer entirely understand.