Make children part of the competition of life
Children have increasingly become a pastime. And people can only spend so much on pastimes. The solution is to arrange competitions where parents have a fair chance.
Part 3 in an article series on the fertility crisis. Part 1 here and part 2 here.
.jpg#mw-jump-to-license){kind=link}
Every time I go to the beach, I ask myself the same question: Why are people so fat these days?
I think there is a simple answer: Because they are allowed to. Sure, normal weight people have a few advantages, not least in the dating market. But overall, being overweight doesn't affect people's social positions much. If people put on 15 kilos of fat, in most cases they will still earn as much money. They will probably keep the same partner too. They will live in the same house, go to the same job and have the same friends.
Imagine an alternative society, where people's degree of physical fitness decided how much money they earned. In such a society, for sure, people would focus intensely on their diets and exercise programs. By contrast, in our current society, people's position is decided by their ability to impress those that hold the money. In that competition, going to the right schools, saying the right things at work or simply doing a good job is much more important than being physically fit.
That competition is so important for people's position in society that they will let off steam in other areas in order to keep up with demands on them. One of those areas is eating. Eating happens in an environment with a surplus of delicious food. There is a recommendation that not too much of it should be consumed. But that is mostly a recommendation. So when the competition that matters weighs on people, they don't have the time, energy and resources left to avoid eating a little too much. Instead, they use what energy and self-control they have on getting to work or school, staying there, doing what they are supposed to do and ideally some more.
It can't be technically impossible or even very hard for most people to be normal weight, because a couple of generations ago most people were, without suffering notably from it. Food was just a little less available and a little less appealing then. In the early 1960s, only 13 percent of Americans were obese. Now 42 percent are.1
The only thing that seems to have happened is that the cost of staying normal weight increased a little bit: Cheaper junk food made calories more available, increasing the effort required to resist them. Most people would have preferred to be normal weight. But now that the cost of being normal weight has increased without a corresponding increase in the reward for being normal weight, people don't have enough resources to spend on staying normal weight. The arrival of effective dieting drugs like Ozempic might shift the balance again. We will see in a few years.
Playing the game
Why am I pointing out these obvious facts? Because I want to suggest a universal formula based on game theory: There is a constant balance between different competitions in society. Small changes in the balance between different competitions can have big effects.
I think that is what is happening in the fertility question. Having a job always gave people social status. Having a family also gave them social status. What we have seen the last couple of decades is an almost imperceptible shift in the relative weights of those two competitions. Having a good job has increased in relative status while having a good family has seen a relative decline.
I'm far from alone in pointing this out: During the last few decades, our society has done its utmost to lower the gains of having a family. It has been blared out for a long time: Being a heterosexual couple taking care of children together is no better than anything else. People who believe they deserve any credit for doing so are bigots who look down on sexual minorities and other non-traditional living arrangements. The only reason why men and women are supposed to live together and have children together is that they enjoy it. It is a pastime along pastimes, we are told. Everybody doesn't believe in this widespread anti-family message. Still, it is one of the things that has tilted the balance of competitions away from family to other competitions.
It is interesting to compare mainstream society to a society where this shift of values didn't happen: The Amish. Among the Amish, the covert competition who can have the most children is alive and well. In her book Runaway Amish Girl (2014), Emma Gingerich, who grew up in a conservative Amish group, writes:
“It seems every Amish family is on a mission to see who can raise the most children.”2
Who can have the most children is one of few things the Amish are allowed to compete over. They can't compete over who has the nicest car, because they are not allowed to drive cars. They can't compete over who wears the most fashionable clothes or who goes to the most exotic places on vacation, because they are not supposed to wear individualistic clothes or travel by air. They can't compete over who has the most interesting and influential job, because Amish people are not allowed to hold jobs that require higher education.
Mainstream Western people compete over all that. And in contrast to the Amish, they own portable cameras connected to the internet, so they can update each other in real time about how they are doing in the competition. What mainstream people do not compete much at all over, is who has the most children. A person who has four children is not considered higher status than a person who has two children.
Everybody knows that in a competition, if you snooze, you lose. And reproduction has become a sort of snoozing. Raising children takes enormous amounts of resources, most of all time. That is time you could have used to participate in the more important life competitions. By raising children you hamper your efforts in those other competitions. And you get preciously little social status for your sacrifices.
Let's compete!
The only thing that can be done to reverse this trend is to change the terms of the competition. If fertility is to increase, having children needs to become part of the competition of life for younger adults. As long as having children is seen as “taking time off”, people will not be able to afford it more than taking time off for other things they like to do.
Two things are needed to alter the balance:
Make family important again. (Just saying that it is could be a beginning.)
Create sanctuaries for working parents, to allow them to stay in the labor market competition.
Parents who hold the main responsibility for children can't compete well in the labor market. Everything else being equal, they will always be outcompeted by people who are free from such responsibilities. This will put a cap on the number of children people can have without being completely uncompetitive in the labor market.
Being uncompetitive on the labor market is not the same thing as being completely unavailable to the labor market. Even people with small children or many children usually have some time and attention left for creating economic value. The difficult thing is to fit in any opportunity to do so between the needs of the children (ask me, I know). The near-impossibility of doing so leads to a sense of wasted talent and energy (ask me, I know that too). How many people have decided to end their reproductive career because they can't stand the prospect of never doing anything more advanced than managing a household again?
I think what is needed is some kind of labor market sanctuaries for parents. For example companies that exclusively employ parents and specialize in remote working and flexible working hours. It should be entirely possible to employ more people doing less work each. People working under child-friendly conditions will never be as efficient as people who give their whole lives to the labor market. But my guess is that they can also accept to be paid less. If society decides that having children is important, parents will not need to buy as much status-enhancing stuff to maintain their social positions.
With the right kind of arrangements, parents will not need to be useless on the labor market. They do not even need to be left with boring and simple tasks. If everyone is a parent, everyone has the same handicap. People will understand each other's priorities and will not view each other as non-dedicated workers because they have important loyalties other than their jobs.
There is one very important advantage of focusing fertility enhancement measures on the labor market: Such measures target the insiders of society. Children need to be raised in families. Families always exist a bit outside of society, in the “private sphere”. If society wants comparatively successful people to have many children, it needs to create functioning compromises between public economic life and private family life. Every pro-fertility measure that encourages people to completely leave the labor market feeds the same tendency: It will appeal more to societal outsiders than to insiders. To the contrary, a reform that genuinely allows people to combine work and family will appeal to people who like it out there in society.
As long as there is an important competition going on and having children is not part of that competition, birth rates will be kept low. If children are considered an extremely expensive leisure activity, few of them will be made. In order to reverse the fertility decline, society needs to make parenting an integrated part of the competition of life.
Emma Gingerich, Runaway Amish Girl: The Great Escape, 2014, 12 percent of e-book
This would not work in the US because our healthcare and retirement is both tied to full time employment (meaning 35 hrs per week). If you aren't working full time you get no benefits, in fact many employers very much love having part time employees specifically so they can get out of paying for their employee's benefits. And if you have a family with children, you really need that health coverage and it is the most expensive in the world here. Bernie Sanders' call for Medicare for All aside, changing our horrifically expensive employment-based health insurance system would be virtually impossible because the whole healthcare industry (one of the largest and wealthiest in the country) would oppose it.
Second, there's a much better example than the Amish you can look to: the Mormons. They also compete to have the most kids. And they do it while ALSO competing to have the best car, best house, best yard, most successful kids, and everything else. If that's really what you're aiming for, I'll tell you how they do it (I've lived in Utah for 20 years so I'm very familiar with how it works). First, you go to church every single week plus an extra day in a church related service group so that's at least two days per week on church activities every week your whole life. Plus they have a "family home night" that everyone follows. Second, you pound it into their heads, over and over,bat every church meeting that family and having kids is the entire point of life. There is basically no other point. If you can't have kids, you adopt. If you can, you have as many as you can afford. Your reward for this is that in heaven you get to have your own world that you populate as gods and have literally MILLIONS of children. And then you give out high status church positions only to families with lots of kids. And high status positions then help you also increase your economic well-being because it's basically a stamp of approval and gets you an in with am instant network of customers and clients and business contacts. You heavily promote gender roles and an expectation that father's provide and women mother and you don't allow same sex marriage.
That's what they do, and it has worked quite well. Everyone is trying to be like Mitt Romney...succeasful, good lookingm rich family with 5 kids and 20 grandkids. But even the Mormons are starting to fall short and native born LDS are having far fewer kids than they did a generation ago. Utah still has more children than any other state in the US, by far, but our population growth is now flat or declining if not for immigration. Because 20 years ago almost everyone here was Mormon and that's no longer the case. Outsiders like me moved in, the internet happened, and what used to be a homogenous insular community is not, any longer.
So, that's what it takes. Not a mild expression of family promotion and values, but a fairly hegemonic repeated pounding into their heads several times a week their entire lives and an insular community where everything is set up to promote that model. But it's really not even sustainable. The Mormons I work with who are over 40 all have a minimum of 3 kids and some have 6 or 7. But those younger usually have 2. A few have 3. And people like me...childless and married, or married with 1 kid, have moved here in droves and we seem to be impacting them way more than the other way around. Not that it's purposeful...I actually enjoyed benefiting from the abundance of kids because it used to keep prices lower and kept workplaces more relaxed and family friendly and less work obsessed.
This is very true.
Another approach is letting two parents do one job. For example, let's say I'm good at writing and spouse is good at math. Why can't we partition a back-office job that requires both, and collaborate, for the same compensation (or more, if more productive)? This is hard within the framework of current labor regulation and regulation around additional benefits. But it would be nice.