Every time someone says “Please think of the children”, fertility sinks by a millimeter

The more every child needs to be thought of, the fewer children there can be

Helen Lovejoy of the Simpsons, best known for the phrase “Will somebody please think of the children!?” Screenshot from Youtube.

Part 1 in a series of 3 on the fertility crisis.

The fertility question is finally getting big. Discussing it is less about is-this-really-a-problem and more about how to solve it. The question is becoming big enough to disagree over. That is encouraging and fun. 

There are two sub-camps outlining themselves in the pro-fertility camp. 

1. Camp Economy: People have too few children because money is elsewhere. Massive amounts of money need to be redirected to parents from other people. 

2. Camp Culture: People have few children because meaning is elsewhere. Culture needs to develop in a direction where having a number of children is part of a meaningful life. 

As Anders and I have explained in several posts, we are adherents to Camp Culture. 

Not because I'm against transfers of resources to families. Just as I think it is morally justified to tax working adults to subsidize old people, I find it morally justified to transfer resources to young people.

Transfers to families clearly make life easier for parents and children. I can take my own family as an example. With six children under 18, the Swedish government pays us a sum corresponding to almost 1000 dollars a month. The government pays that sum to all families of that size. There is no legal opportunity to decline the money, a court ruled in 2020. This compulsory government money is our main income. I can't say I dislike it. In many ways it makes life both practically easier and emotionally calmer. 

And still, it doesn't affect our decision to have one child more or less at all. Since 2022 inflation has run wild. The cost of feeding our family has jumped by over 25% during this time. And food constitutes about half of our monthly expenses. Shoes, gas, electricity and most other things we buy didn't exactly get cheaper either. And since the Swedish child benefit has increased by exactly 0% during the same time our income in real terms has effectively shrunk by 20%. 

What did I do about it? I wrote a silly poem about price increases. I envisioned that we should pick a melody and sing it around the kitchen table instead of complaining over and over again that the price of this-or-that essential was up. And then we decided that it was a good idea to have a sixth child. The fact that we had just become 20% poorer did not affect this decision one bit. Raising children is such an important undertaking that a little more or a little less money hardly affects it at all. If money was my prime motivator in life I wouldn't have had any children at all. 

Anders and I seem to be representative here. In a very interesting statistics post, Aria Babu shows that the relationship between fertility and a very important issue for parents of young children, day care cost, is almost flat. For example, in the culturally and linguistically not very distant cities of Vienna and Zurich, daycare costs differ a lot: 3 percent of average income in Vienna and 64 percent in Zurich. Still the fertility rate of the two cities are almost exactly the same. Also big inconveniences, like very expensive daycare, do not deter people who have resolved that they want children.

Making it a job

More and more people seem to be saying: Subsidies to parents are just not enough. Benefits paid to parents have no effect because they are too small.

There is a fundamental problem with that strategy: If the government pays people to have children, parenting will be a government job. In the absence of an explicit eugenics program, it will be a government job people give to themselves. That is, people who see any better alternative to the fixed-rate government job will take that alternative. Generation after generation, people who know they can't adapt or won't adapt, for one or another reason, will have a disproportionate number of children.

Robin Hanson has an idea on how to avoid that mistake: Give parents money according to how much taxes their children pay when they grow up, or according to how much taxes financial markets expect them to pay later. 

It is an idea provocative enough to be interesting. It raises a number of questions, like gender discrimination: Since women pay less taxes than men, would it then be fair to reward the parents of daughters less than the parents of sons? In general, the scheme only encourages children, not grandchildren: If people are rewarded for producing good taxpayers, there will be a conflict between parents and grown-up children. The parents will have incentives to nudge their sons and daughters to work day and night and never marry. The sons and daughters will have incentives to have children who themselves develop into good taxpayers who work day and night and never get married. 

However, I think the main weakness of the proposal is that it completely focuses on compensating parents for the ever-rising cost of having children. The reason why people have few children is that society is constantly raising the cost of having a child more than it compensates people for that cost. Steeply raising subsidies is one way to change that equation, at least temporarily. Another way is to take a look at the ever-rising costs.

Show me the money 

Those costs are mostly not of the strictly financial kind. In the previously mentioned blog post Aria Babu publishes an interesting finding: The more people believe that preschool children are hurt by their mother working, the fewer children are born. In other words, there are cultural beliefs that make raising children costly. If you expect children to be very exacting you need very elaborate life arrangements before getting children. The more specific life arrangements that are required, the fewer people will qualify as parents. 

I find Aria Babu's observations very plausible, because I think I have observed the same thing in the real world. When Anders and I were young, in 2007, we spent half a year in Berlin. Young people were supposed to do that those days (rents were low). We had a one year old son. Back then, the German total fertility rate was even a bit lower than the current rate, at 1.37 (and even lower in Berlin). It was 1.8 in Sweden, and low German fertility was talked about quite a bit. Anders and I were surprised at how Germans reacted to our child. They turned on the streets. They made faces. A man allowed our son to almost break his camera because he was so cute. A child seemed to be a thing in Germany. We were not used to that kind of attention. In Sweden children were treated as something normal. In France too, where we lived before and after we lived in Germany. I concluded that the Germans probably were so bad at making babies because they thought children were so special that they simply couldn't afford them.

I think the development during the 16 years that have passed since then supports that theory. People in Sweden, and in Western societies in general, have increasingly become convinced that children are both needy and vulnerable. As has been highlighted by Leonore Skenazy at Team Haidt: Generation Y is raising its children in a much more anxious way than they were raised themselves. Even if the idea that working mothers hurt children seems to be retreating, there are ten new threats against children ready to take over its role as fertility suppressor.

For a while, it looked like generous parental leave and subsidized daycare would convince people to have more children. I suspect that the causality in reality was much the other way around: Societies that didn't consider children extremely vulnerable built an infrastructure of parental leave and daycare. Societies that considered children very vulnerable didn't. People had fewer children in the latter kind of society because they were afraid to be unable to raise a child properly.

Now that people are seeing more and more other threats to children than working mothers, Scandinavia is losing its advantage. In 2022, Finland had a total fertility rate of 1.32. Norway had 1.42, Sweden had 1.52, Denmark had 1.55. Swedes can no longer talk about Germany's fertility failure, because Sweden and Germany now have almost identical total fertility rates: in 2022, the total fertility rate in Germany was 1.54. 

What happened is that Scandinavian welfare states did just keep to the status quo, while the perceived cost of having a child is increasing. Just maintaining the same level of support to parents is not enough when society is at the same time constantly increasing the cost of having a child.

Two races to the bottom 

Basically, the costs of having children have ballooned in two directions. One is the typical East Asian direction. People fear that the elite is taking off and getting ahead of everyone else. For that reason, everybody copies the habits of the elite and overinvests in education. 

The other is the typical Scandinavian direction: People fear that the lower class is dragging down society as a whole. For that reason people, and government agencies, are holding parents to high moral standards. The goal is that absolutely no citizen should fail in life, because when people do so, they become a threat to society. 

East Asia and Scandinavia are extremes. Most societies, for example the US and the UK, contain both kinds of fears to various degrees. Although the fears come from two different angles, they both lead to the same result: The cost of having children increases. The East Asian type of fear tends to lead to monetary cost increases, because the additional education children need to stay in the rat race is provided by paid professionals. The Scandinavian-style fear leads to high costs in terms of parent-shaming. More about that phenomenon in my next post.

Substacks linked to in this post:

Beliefs that kill birth rates

Four Uses For Personal Tax Assets

Good News For Anxious Kids (And Parents)