The Fertility Crisis - There Is No Cure In A Free Country

For it's the freedom to do other stuff that's causing the fertility decline

As one wag had it on Twitter, this is an unfortunate layout at The Times:

That is not really one of those viciously philoprogenitive images now, is it? True, I am childless but I did start shaving before I was 40.

Leaving aside such vile calumnies the problem is that the article that follows is even worse. True, Onward is really a vehicle to find Seb a safe seat, a Tory one if must be, so the arguments made don’t really have to make all that much sense. Enough to sway a few on a candidate selection committee, that’ll do.

Part of the problem is in the evidence being used to bolster the argument:

Another found that British women were not, on average, having as many children as they would like (women say they would like an average 2.32 children; the UK’s birthrate is 1.61).

But that’s near always been true. Ever since people started asking the question the response from women has been one more child than they did have. No, we don’t have to understand why (except, of course, everyone likes having another baby around the house until they actually do have another baby around the house) we just have to grasp that this has always been true. Therefore this is not evidence of something going wrong now. This is just a feature of the species, not evidence of some policy failure or terror of the modern world.

Or:

The problems mount from the off, starting with money worries before a child is even conceived. Prospective parents can struggle to access help with fertility treatment, which operates as a postcode lottery. At present, 90 per cent of NHS commissioning bodies are failing to offer the three free cycles of IVF recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. If couples opt for further private treatment, they will need to find roughly £7,000 for each round. The Department of Health should remove barriers — for instance, lesbian couples have to personally pay for two years of artificial insemination treatment before accessing IVF.

Given that the vast, overwhelming, majority of children are produced by the traditional two-backed beast method this is an irrelevance.

Or:

Once couples have had children, the childcare quandary arrives. The average weekly price for a part-time nursery place of 25 hours for a child under two is £140. Research by Onward has found that 51 per cent said childcare costs were putting people off having children. Some progress has been made, with the 15 hours of free childcare for three to four-year-olds kicking in from September, yet the system remains complex and too many childcare providers are collapsing. Again, the government can and should act.

Back when fertility rates were higher there was no childcare. Well, other than in those families that could afford a Nanny and my Granny worked as one, not employed one (well, for a little bit when in Foreign, but that’s different class and income wise).

Lordy Be:

Statutory paternity leave is only two weeks, and giving parents more time together in those earlier years can make the prospect of having a family less daunting.

So Daddy earning less money for longer will increase the fertility rate?

And:

At the last Conservative Party conference, Rishi Sunak proclaimed he wanted to deliver long-term solutions to the country’s thorniest challenges. Few are as urgent as helping parents have the families to which they aspire. All these policies should be brought together to form a “new deal for parents”. This is not merely about the next election; the country will be thankful in decades to come for some bold steps now. Or as Pope Francis put it: “It is necessary to have the courage to bet on families.”

And we can guess who is in mind to be the writer of that policy which will then lead to selection for a nice safe seat.

We should even be dismissive of the housing cost thing. Because yes, housing is too expensive, we should make it cheaper and the way to do that is blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. For that’s when we started to have a national policy on housing and that’s why housing is currently shit. Because we’ve had a national policy about it. Which does, of course pose a certain problem with the idea of having a national policy on fucking. Think on it, the idea that British sex lives could get even worse.

But the reason we should sort out the price of housing is not so that more people fuck fertilely. It’s because current British housing is shit. Given that it’s shit as a result of government policy let’s stop doing that and make it less shit. That’s all the justification needed.

But after we’ve gone through that there’s more I’m afraid. Even if we were to accept - and we shouldn’t - the maunderings here it still won’t reverse or solve the fertility crisis. Simply because none of these things are anything other than very minor, at the margin, tangential issues. It just isn’t true that if houses were cheap then Charlotte Gill (just because that’s the name of a female columnist I can currently remember) is going to pump out 4 or 6 kiddies. Sure, it might be true that the UK average rises, a tad. Some fraction of a point or two - 1.5 to 1.6 kids per woman over a lifetime, something like that maybe.

We can test this too. Not just test it, prove it:

There are two things going on here. The first is Darwin. Yep, that Victorian bloke with the beard you can hide a flock of finches in, Charlie. The aim of animal life is to have grandchildren. Back when half your own children would die before puberty that meant having to have a handful to have an evens chance of achieving the goal. So, people did have a passel of kids. This is what explains that gross difference between European and African birth rates. That 50% mortality before puberty (and yes, the past was horrendous enough that that really was what happened) ended in the 1880s, 1890s, that sort of time, in much of Europe. It ended in the 1980s, if not 2010, in places like Liberia. Attitudes like this take a generation to change and there we are, there’s one reason for the decline. It has become less expensive to have fewer children.

Fertility rates drop off a cliff a generation after child mortality rates do. This has been true everywhere.

Also, no, it’s not contraception. The falls happened before reliable and widely available contraception. You may only have met Gran and Great Gran when they were wizened hulks but the fact that you exist shows that they did know how to have a good time. Good times also including how to have them without - necessarily perhaps, with a low probability possibly - producing you.

The other issue is that having more children has become more expensive. This is also called the economic emancipation of women. Back when Granny was a Nanny (both Gs were born in the 1900 to WWI -ish area) there were really only two acceptable working occupations for a bourgeois woman - nursing or teaching. It probably wouldn’t be possible to continue with either of those after marriage either. Nanny, as happened, was the only form of “service” that wasn’t quite service and so would do in a pinch. As Granny R did, doing it for a Baron in Seville wasn’t that much of a step down from being a shopkeeper’s daughter in Dundrum, the Co Down one. Granny D became a nurse. Then married a doctor.

Now, of course, we most delightfully have the full economic emancipation of women. About the only job really off limits is sperm donor and they’re working on that too. Excellent, great and no, there’s not even a hint from me that this should in any way be reversed.

However, this does also mean something else. That the cost of having a child is higher.

Whether this should be so or not it is. On average mothers earn less than non-mothers. About 8-10% for the first child, further but declining amounts for each subsequent. Fathers earn more than non-fathers. Quite why, other than the impulse to provide for the family hasn’t really been studied but it is there in the numbers. These two facts - and they are facts - explain all of the observable gender pay gap. We do not need anything else, at all, to explain to us those differences in average pay.

We can leave aside, here and for this argument, why those gaps exist. For they don’t change the next part.

Women now have more opportunities than nurse, teacher (or Nanny) until they decide to get hitched for legal fucking and so they take them. Yay Freedom. Women can also, with that little bit of juggling that having a family requires, also continue to work after parturition. Yay Freedom.

But look at what has happened. The costs of having fewer children have gone down. The costs of having more children have gone up. And the rise in costs isn’t the cash either, it’s in all those opportunities for doing something else with life other than just changing nappies.

Well, humans do less of things that are more expensive, more of things that are cheaper. So, women have fewer children these days.

All this talk of childcare and so on is something at the margins, not a solution to the problem.

The reason I put Italy into that chart is because they have one solution to this. Largely - -ish, you know - women with children don’t work there. Those who do tend to be the haute bourgeois in the professions. Italy has, by European standards, a very low, in the 5 to 7% range, blended gender pay gap. Simply because most of those hit by the motherhood pay penalty aren’t in the job market. They also have a markedly low fertility rate.

Britain and Sweden have fairly equal fertility rates. But as we all know in Sweden the moment the amniotic sack pops then there’s social democracy providing full support, to the extent that there’s a full school bus of workers supporting the new mother before the episiotomy stitches have healed. Doesn’t make much difference to the fertility rate compared with the UK system.

Nor do comparatively affordable house prices in Italy or Sweden make much difference. Nor even that most Italian housing is inherited, not bought (no, really, the Italian economy has long been weird in this respect, mortgage debt is tiny in comparison, that’s why they can afford to buy all the Italian government bonds).

The fertility rate has declined not because of house prices, childcare or anything else so amenable to public policy. It’s happened because of that social glory of this past century, the economic emancipation of women. Fewer dead kids, more things to do in this life, both mean fewer births. And that’s it, that’s the whole and complete of it. We’ll also not change it without reversing that grand and glorious change.

Should we do so? No, of course not. The liberal aim is to maximise free choice. That each individual gets to maximise their own personal utility absent significant third party costs. So, we’ve spent this last century finally freeing half the species. Great! The society that results, an ageing population, a falling fertility rate, they’ve just things we have to suck up and deal with. For they are the results of that freedom and who the fuck are you to tell people how they should live their lives?