The reason that many of my friends and colleagues with children have stopped at two is purely financial. The cost of a month's childcare commitments for parents who work full-time, or close to it, is equivalent to a month's rent or mortgage until the child is three years old. That's two years of paying two lots of that amount for an eldest child.
If you can manage to time a second so that you at least have one in 30 free hours and the other at full rate then you only have to worry about paying a mortgage and a third each month. I'd wager that one of the worst things that could happen to any couple planning for a third child would be their mortgage payments going up by £500 a month just as their nursery payments come down by the same amount.
Anyone that does have three children, spread out so they aren't doubling up on full whack nursery fees would be paying them for nine years.
Of course, for some people older realtives are available to help but that can mean one or two days a week rather than full time and it should be also considered that many of the couples who aren't having a third child are ones who don't live in the same part of the UK (or indeed aren't from the UK) as they were born in as they moved for university, moved for the graduate careers and their partner did they same so parents aren't 15 mins down the road like their grandparents are likely to have been.
Purely speculation but it could be that without the policies in place in Scandinavian countries their birthrates might be even lower!
As someone with 3 kids I completely agree with your point James about "encouraging existing parents to have more kids." If the government is serious about the issue.
This will be by far the path of least resistance.
We're not having any more due mainly to starting relatively late in life. But I could imagine a scenario where we had another one if we'd started earlier and/or had the kids closer together.
If the government is serious about the issue it would need to do the following 4 things (IMHO).
1. Build more houses. We thankfully live in a house big enough where each kid can have their own bedroom but I realise the vast majority of millennials are not so lucky.
2. Make full-time nursery free or almost free for everyone starting from age 1. At one stage where we had two kids in nursery full-time our fees were more than mortgage payments. We're lucky enough to be high income earners, but it would have been extremely difficult to have paid for all 3 at the same time. Ontario has significantly reduced nursery fees, which has benefited my sister.
3. End the two-child benefit cap. So disappointing that Labour is not going to reverse this.
4. Have escalating benefits the more children a family has. I think to make it politically palatable this would probably have to take the form of tax breaks/credits rather than direct payments. Maybe something like lowering the rate of income tax for a set number of years (until kid is 5 years old) with a lower rate for more kids. This way it would not be seen as a handout. I know Hungary is trying something similar, bit not sure what the result has been so far. Also I realise these sort of baby bonus schemes have a bit of fascist overtone to them, which makes me a little uncomfortable even if I think they might work.
And even then, I think most of these will probably have only a marginal impact on birth rates, so immigration is going to have to remain a part of the solution. And I, like I suspect most readers here, am happy with that.
"Perhaps raising a child is fulfilling, life-affirming and gives life definition and purpose?" Yup, pretty much got it in one there. It also means that noisy ones on airplanes/trains/etc don't bother you in the least - because you can think "aah, isn't my one."
On the broader tax revenue point, f 70 is the new 65, then the government would be stupid not to raise the pension age to 70 and keep on hiking it - which it is already starting to do. The way that life expectancy (after age 5) has risen compared to the pension age since national insurance was introduced is pretty remarkable, but also shows how state pensions are unsustainable at current retirement ages. So "work for longer, expect less" seems like the solution. However, you'll be a hell of a politician if you manage to sell that to the electorate.
The problem with raising the pension age is that it's fine for "indoor work, no heavy lifting" people like, I suspect, most of James's subscribers, but it's no use for people who *have* been outside in the pissing rain all of their life and whose knees are now knackered.
This has been the problem with Macron's attempts to reform the French pension system: while you can say "OK, there are far too many exceptions and we should just wipe the slate clean" and not *immediately* sound like a flat tax zealot, in practice not *all* of the loopholes are because of corrupt lobbying practices by special interests. (The irony of asking Conservatives to think about Chesterton's Fence is not lost on me here :=) .)
Conversely, you have people who have seen their mates retire and basically immediately die, who decide "no, I'm going to stay in my well-paid desk job and carry on doing my stuff", and suddenly nobody aged younger than 40 ever gets promoted.
There does seem to be some sort of curve where countries where women are excluded from professional work (like Saudi Arabia) and countries where there is good support for professional women to have children (like Sweden) have reasonable fertility rates, but countries where women work in professional jobs but don't get adequate maternity leave or access to childcare have much lower fertility (like Japan or South Korea or Italy). There are exceptions, the most obvious being the USA.
1.6 is the sort of TFR where population decline is at a reasonable rate and can be manageable with a bit of immigration. You'd need about 1% per year, ie 800,000 or so to the UK to maintain population indefinitely. Given the actual demographics of immigrants, a bit less would work. That's a manageable number.
But 0.8 (Korea) is a completely different story. For 1000 grandparents, you have 800 children and 640 grandchildren at 1.6. You have 400 children and 160 grandchildren at 0.8.
Bring in enough immigration to cover that and your population gets completely replaced within three generations. That's too fast to acculturate new immigrants, and there's no way voters accept that. Which means a catastrophic population crash. And then what? What does Korea look like in 2100? Or will population bounce back when there's loads of cheap housing because it was built when there were five times as many people?
If we're going to live in a world where population is stable, it will have to go up in some countries and down in others. There's no good reason why we shouldn't be one of the countries where it goes down. But 1.6 is about as low as it can go before that exponential curve starts to look scary.
We see small effects from e.g. 5k spent, let's see what happens with 50k spent (or more). What's the value of a productive taxpayer to the country over their lifetime vs. what it would cost?
If Matt Goodwin were really concerned about birth rates, he'd be extremely relaxed about migrants coming here from developing countries and bringing their natalist ethos with them...
Nice (and funny) piece. I think in the pursuit of a clear left-right binary of solutions you miss a middle way that could be more practically achievable than either social regression or massive new public welfare costs. And that is the sort of new wave feminism put forward by people like Louise Perry and Mary Harrington. Their basic thrust (if I've understood it right) is that we've "thrown the baby out with the bathwater" (what a wonderfully appropriate metaphor!) by (accidentally?) devaluing motherhood as we have put more value on women becoming self-actualising girl-bosses or whatever they want.
How long would the pyramid take to level out? Eventually, the falling birth rate will be reflected in later generations.
The fewer babies being born, the fewer seventy year olds there will eventually be. By definition, I suppose that takes seventy years from when the birth rate started falling. About 1963, according to a UN chart I’ve just found. Currently, we still have the large post-war boomer generation with us.
If the birth rate remains less than the necessary replacement rate, then I guess there will always be fewer younger people than older people but the discrepancy is likely to be smaller than it is now. And if older people are healthier for longer, it’s possible that a smaller discrepancy may not be such a massive burden on the younger generations.
There's a wider question which seems to be missed in this discussion - if people have more babies, how many of them would be net contributors over their lifespan and actually help the situation?
Was thinking along similar lines. But I’m a pronatalist, so I’m always thinking along lines like this. The problem being immigrants are more motivated due to their life experiences than native borns, and their strong motives to provide remittances back home. And that our infrastructure, economies and welfare states were built on and depend on cheap labour. TFRs had to be above 3 to produce those labour markets to produce economic growth, to produce productive citizens. I wonder if the doughnut economists grasp that.
Really enjoyed this article, but the push back against the lack of evidence was weak. With climate change, the realistic policies clearly work. Building solar panels so that we can use the same account of electricity without using greenhouse gases does actually reduce the amount of warming. Here, your argument seems to be basically: I have no other ideas and this is a good thing to do anyway. The first half isn't a good justification, and the second half isn't adding anything to previous arguments for the intervention.
The reason that many of my friends and colleagues with children have stopped at two is purely financial. The cost of a month's childcare commitments for parents who work full-time, or close to it, is equivalent to a month's rent or mortgage until the child is three years old. That's two years of paying two lots of that amount for an eldest child.
If you can manage to time a second so that you at least have one in 30 free hours and the other at full rate then you only have to worry about paying a mortgage and a third each month. I'd wager that one of the worst things that could happen to any couple planning for a third child would be their mortgage payments going up by £500 a month just as their nursery payments come down by the same amount.
Anyone that does have three children, spread out so they aren't doubling up on full whack nursery fees would be paying them for nine years.
Of course, for some people older realtives are available to help but that can mean one or two days a week rather than full time and it should be also considered that many of the couples who aren't having a third child are ones who don't live in the same part of the UK (or indeed aren't from the UK) as they were born in as they moved for university, moved for the graduate careers and their partner did they same so parents aren't 15 mins down the road like their grandparents are likely to have been.
Purely speculation but it could be that without the policies in place in Scandinavian countries their birthrates might be even lower!
As someone with 3 kids I completely agree with your point James about "encouraging existing parents to have more kids." If the government is serious about the issue.
This will be by far the path of least resistance.
We're not having any more due mainly to starting relatively late in life. But I could imagine a scenario where we had another one if we'd started earlier and/or had the kids closer together.
If the government is serious about the issue it would need to do the following 4 things (IMHO).
1. Build more houses. We thankfully live in a house big enough where each kid can have their own bedroom but I realise the vast majority of millennials are not so lucky.
2. Make full-time nursery free or almost free for everyone starting from age 1. At one stage where we had two kids in nursery full-time our fees were more than mortgage payments. We're lucky enough to be high income earners, but it would have been extremely difficult to have paid for all 3 at the same time. Ontario has significantly reduced nursery fees, which has benefited my sister.
3. End the two-child benefit cap. So disappointing that Labour is not going to reverse this.
4. Have escalating benefits the more children a family has. I think to make it politically palatable this would probably have to take the form of tax breaks/credits rather than direct payments. Maybe something like lowering the rate of income tax for a set number of years (until kid is 5 years old) with a lower rate for more kids. This way it would not be seen as a handout. I know Hungary is trying something similar, bit not sure what the result has been so far. Also I realise these sort of baby bonus schemes have a bit of fascist overtone to them, which makes me a little uncomfortable even if I think they might work.
And even then, I think most of these will probably have only a marginal impact on birth rates, so immigration is going to have to remain a part of the solution. And I, like I suspect most readers here, am happy with that.
"Perhaps raising a child is fulfilling, life-affirming and gives life definition and purpose?" Yup, pretty much got it in one there. It also means that noisy ones on airplanes/trains/etc don't bother you in the least - because you can think "aah, isn't my one."
On the broader tax revenue point, f 70 is the new 65, then the government would be stupid not to raise the pension age to 70 and keep on hiking it - which it is already starting to do. The way that life expectancy (after age 5) has risen compared to the pension age since national insurance was introduced is pretty remarkable, but also shows how state pensions are unsustainable at current retirement ages. So "work for longer, expect less" seems like the solution. However, you'll be a hell of a politician if you manage to sell that to the electorate.
The problem with raising the pension age is that it's fine for "indoor work, no heavy lifting" people like, I suspect, most of James's subscribers, but it's no use for people who *have* been outside in the pissing rain all of their life and whose knees are now knackered.
This has been the problem with Macron's attempts to reform the French pension system: while you can say "OK, there are far too many exceptions and we should just wipe the slate clean" and not *immediately* sound like a flat tax zealot, in practice not *all* of the loopholes are because of corrupt lobbying practices by special interests. (The irony of asking Conservatives to think about Chesterton's Fence is not lost on me here :=) .)
Conversely, you have people who have seen their mates retire and basically immediately die, who decide "no, I'm going to stay in my well-paid desk job and carry on doing my stuff", and suddenly nobody aged younger than 40 ever gets promoted.
There does seem to be some sort of curve where countries where women are excluded from professional work (like Saudi Arabia) and countries where there is good support for professional women to have children (like Sweden) have reasonable fertility rates, but countries where women work in professional jobs but don't get adequate maternity leave or access to childcare have much lower fertility (like Japan or South Korea or Italy). There are exceptions, the most obvious being the USA.
1.6 is the sort of TFR where population decline is at a reasonable rate and can be manageable with a bit of immigration. You'd need about 1% per year, ie 800,000 or so to the UK to maintain population indefinitely. Given the actual demographics of immigrants, a bit less would work. That's a manageable number.
But 0.8 (Korea) is a completely different story. For 1000 grandparents, you have 800 children and 640 grandchildren at 1.6. You have 400 children and 160 grandchildren at 0.8.
Bring in enough immigration to cover that and your population gets completely replaced within three generations. That's too fast to acculturate new immigrants, and there's no way voters accept that. Which means a catastrophic population crash. And then what? What does Korea look like in 2100? Or will population bounce back when there's loads of cheap housing because it was built when there were five times as many people?
If we're going to live in a world where population is stable, it will have to go up in some countries and down in others. There's no good reason why we shouldn't be one of the countries where it goes down. But 1.6 is about as low as it can go before that exponential curve starts to look scary.
Typo of 800,000 for 700,000 in there. Phone app doesn't have an edit button...
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-rate-roundup-1 is good on what actually might work. I feel like he has another post on it somewhere too, but couldn't find it.
TLDR: interventions don't spend enough money.
We see small effects from e.g. 5k spent, let's see what happens with 50k spent (or more). What's the value of a productive taxpayer to the country over their lifetime vs. what it would cost?
If Matt Goodwin were really concerned about birth rates, he'd be extremely relaxed about migrants coming here from developing countries and bringing their natalist ethos with them...
Nice (and funny) piece. I think in the pursuit of a clear left-right binary of solutions you miss a middle way that could be more practically achievable than either social regression or massive new public welfare costs. And that is the sort of new wave feminism put forward by people like Louise Perry and Mary Harrington. Their basic thrust (if I've understood it right) is that we've "thrown the baby out with the bathwater" (what a wonderfully appropriate metaphor!) by (accidentally?) devaluing motherhood as we have put more value on women becoming self-actualising girl-bosses or whatever they want.
Another substacker was talking about this same point recently: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/humanity-is-going-to-shrink
See the Mastodon comments: https://mastodon.social/@bruces/110938609386692432
How long would the pyramid take to level out? Eventually, the falling birth rate will be reflected in later generations.
The fewer babies being born, the fewer seventy year olds there will eventually be. By definition, I suppose that takes seventy years from when the birth rate started falling. About 1963, according to a UN chart I’ve just found. Currently, we still have the large post-war boomer generation with us.
If the birth rate remains less than the necessary replacement rate, then I guess there will always be fewer younger people than older people but the discrepancy is likely to be smaller than it is now. And if older people are healthier for longer, it’s possible that a smaller discrepancy may not be such a massive burden on the younger generations.
There's a wider question which seems to be missed in this discussion - if people have more babies, how many of them would be net contributors over their lifespan and actually help the situation?
Was thinking along similar lines. But I’m a pronatalist, so I’m always thinking along lines like this. The problem being immigrants are more motivated due to their life experiences than native borns, and their strong motives to provide remittances back home. And that our infrastructure, economies and welfare states were built on and depend on cheap labour. TFRs had to be above 3 to produce those labour markets to produce economic growth, to produce productive citizens. I wonder if the doughnut economists grasp that.
Really enjoyed this article, but the push back against the lack of evidence was weak. With climate change, the realistic policies clearly work. Building solar panels so that we can use the same account of electricity without using greenhouse gases does actually reduce the amount of warming. Here, your argument seems to be basically: I have no other ideas and this is a good thing to do anyway. The first half isn't a good justification, and the second half isn't adding anything to previous arguments for the intervention.