What you present is not *the* economic explanation. A macro-economic explanation is the transformation of average daily life (via industrialization) from a labor-intensive to a capital-intensive process. We no longer labor in the forest and field where a large family with lots of children can provide greater labor output and older children offset the cost of raising younger ones - we are in a capital-intensive framework where the limiting factor to family size is parental income, older children are not deemed capable of correctly educating younger children, children cannot work to offset the costs of their own upbringing, and financial investment in formal education is necessary for socio-economic success.
I think the location of work plus the lack of housing in those locations is the biggest predictor of family size. Urban/suburban areas hold most of the jobs. Cost of rent/mortgage has skyrocketed, and affordable housing has not kept up.
Owning a house and securing a college education for your offspring was the dream of families in the 50's/60's.
The dream is not so appealing anymore.
Women still have a natural desire to have children. But it is getting harder to see motherhood as a positive in light of social media, modern journalism, and men expecting their wives to produce an income. Rejection of religion coupled with selfish grandparents don't help.
A possible link would be that more progressive countries have more immigrants from places with higher fertility rates, and these immigrants are the ones pushing the TFR up.
That's directionally true in many cases, but not a super-meaningful factor in France, which has an overall TFR of 1.9 and a native-born French TFR of 1.8.
The Nordic countries have taken in proportionally more immigrants than other European countries, and are seeing their TFR decline. In Denmark and Iceland, the native-born women actually have higher TFR than immigrants.
As a Western European - I see immigrant families have a lot of unemployed relatives they can count on for support. They also have much different standards in terms of what they ought to do to raise the children (lots of unsupervised outdoor play from quite a young age, no pressure to be in all the extra-curriculars).
I've always wanted to have a big family but for me, despite having a high earning husband, it's expensive because any break I get I have to pay for - hire a cleaner, meal service, or babysitter. There's very little in the way of hand-me-downs from relatives because hardly anyone is having kids. And there is a lot of social pressure to do everything better than previous generations (which is a lot of work): break the intergenerational chain of trauma, provide evidence-based enrichment toys&activities, organize playdates with appropriate peers, dress them 'aesthetic', nurse on demand, on and on it goes. My grandma had 7 kids but she put the babies in the attic so she wouldn't hear the crying. And opened a window near the playpen rather than take them to the park. And she didn't lose sleep pumping for milk when my dad was a hungry baby, the greengrocers wife simply nursed him, too.
I try to be sensible (no shame in kids sharing bedrooms, second-hand clothes, or showering weekly rather than daily), but it's still a lot for someone with zero support. I could make it easier on myself by doing cry-it-out and letting the streets raise my kids and bottle feeding, but am unwilling to accept the risks that go with that. And we've had to reinvent the wheel in terms of how to raise a child, because while we are aware of some dysfunctional stuff we don't want to repeat, there's so much conflicting information about what the *right* way is it's exhausting. So my family size is a lot smaller than I would have liked.
Another factor - I see quite a lot of men who want families, but in stead of dating women who want children too, they date the prettiest girl they can find for years and years waiting and hoping she'll come around.
And as a SAHM, I've personally been directly insulted and demeaned for that choice by other women (both working mothers and childless) because it's considered very uncool and low social status to be SAHM. So while many people believe children are better off with a SAHM, SAHMs are seen as losers... It's hard to experience that kind of rejection.
Another one - it's considered very uncool and even irresponsible to have a big family by many. My brother had both sets of grandparents (who had bigger families themselves) react negatively when he announced his second (despite being married & well-off), and I've heard many comments about how I should not have more kids after my second. Another social rejection thing.
I've read somewhere that policies like giving parents money when they have kids have the most direct measurable effect in encouraging the dredges of society to reproduce (drug addicts, families already monitored by CPS, mentally disordered assisted living, all that) but there's not much effect on functional, healthy & more independent families.
I would have liked to have a much bigger family. For me what would have helped:
- more support from family (practically, like meal trains, hand-me-downs and babysitting) - that's the main thing
- less hatred/judgement from neighbors
- having a regular income at an earlier age (we only started having kids when that was in order)
- less conflicting information == more comprehensive evidence-based info on how to not repeat the sins of our fathers re: childrearing&trauma (especially necessary for us because we had a high needs profoundly gifted firstborn and it took a lot of figuring out how to handle him, now that we've got the hang of that we might have a few more in quick succession before my eggs shrivel up).
Wow you basically wrote all of my thoughts on this subject in one comment. 🤣
But yeah I relate hard with the SAHMs being best for kids but also losers. It can occur in a single individual, who both praises me for the care I give my kids but urges me to get a job so I can remain independent. I think if she thinks from my kids’ POV, she wants me home. If she thinks from my interests, she wants me at work. It’s weird. We can’t win.
I personally think that this correlation ignores one factor: People afraid of their children being disadvantaged by giving births in a disadvantaged situation will have less children. And that is what those "conservative" value questions you point towards, point out. If you believe that children will be worse off, you will put it off, until you can afford to only have one person within the household work.
Similar to how people living in an urban area have less kids than those living in a rural area: the question of "Do I have space for a kid" makes people put off having kids, until they got enough space by moving into a larger apartment or out of the city.
There are so many factors which could be affecting fertility, and they may not be affecting it by the same amount in every case, and the interactions of multiple factors can get complicated very quickly.
For instance, population density definitely matters to some extent. Hong Kong has 6,900 people per square kilometre and TFR of 1.1 children per woman, while Norway has 15 people per square kilometre and a TFR of 1.6 children per woman. Bear in mind as well that 13% of Norwegians own a second home (a “hytte”) in the countryside. That comparison is evidence of a significant effect, but not as radical an effect as I’d expect if I thought population density would explain everything. I notice, BTW, that France, like the Nordic countries, has a relatively low population density (119 people per square km, though Paris is super-densely packed. The figure I got from googling Paris looks too high to be plausible - almost four times more densely packed than Hong Kong, which I can’t believe…).
In the UK, London is starting to approach Hong Kong levels of population density of the mid-1980s (5,700 people per square kilometre). Its TFR is 1.54 (close to where Hong Kong’s was in the mid-1980s), while the rest of England is 1.7. That’s a differential, but not a dramatic one. I suspect the reason it’s not so dramatic is, London is where the jobs and money are. If you live in London you can earn more money, but face more competition for housing, school places etc. If you live in the North East of England, you may have more space and cheaper housing, but less money.
Have you considered the hypothesis that birthrates simply decline as access to cheap, reliable birth control improves? I strongly suspect culture and economics normally only play a minor role, insofar as they affect the availability of birth control. (Though they may have influence at some extremes.)
[Edit: apologies if this came of as "just asking questions"; I was posting under pressure - there's a more-developed answer below]
Why should we take this kind of survey data at face value? Among other weaknesses, surveys do not and can not pose the concrete trade-offs people have to make in real life.
This is especially strange because "cheap, high-quality contraception lowers fertility" used to be the null hypothesis, so well-substantiated that it was the primary plan of action for several agencies. The last time I searched for data on the topic, I could only find good statistics from NGOs trying to *reduce* fertility. From the 1960s through (at least) the 2000s, countless WHO and UN programs aimed to bring down the fertility rate in poor countries. Their primary strategy? Improving access to contraception.
Maybe this is just Simpson's paradox, or maybe there are other factors driving contraceptive access and low fertility in the same direction, but the intuitive, causal link between the two is strong and I *think* the data is strong, Here's a section summary from the paywalled article on Science Direct, "Contraception in historical and global perspective":
> [B]etween 1960 and 2003, the percentage of married women in developing regions using any form of contraception rose from approximately 10% to 60%, and fertility halved from six to three births per woman. In industrialized countries, contraceptive practice also rose and fertility fell, but changes were less dramatic because family sizes were already modest in 1960 and contraception was already well established.
I can understand saying, well, we can't (and don't want to) get the genie back into the bottle, so what can _improve_ fertility in a world with cheap, easily-accessible, effective contraception? But that's a different question than the one this post asks: "[t]he big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors." I don't see how we got to that framing without overlooking well-established historical data.
People may want kids, but they want kids less than they want other things.
Might one contributing factor to these correlations be that there is often a substantial gap between the values people report having and the values they live by in practice? In the wealthy Scandinavian city where I live, for example, the areas where people are most liberal about immigration are inevitably those with the most homogenous white population. And then there is white flight: Young progressives often buy their first apartments in the cheap suburbs where non-Western immigrants are in majority, but almost inevitably move to more affluent/whiter areas as soon as their single child is ready to move from daycare to school.
I think it'd be interesting to see correlations from studies asking personal questions alongside the generic ones, such as
* I'd like to have (more) children but at the moment I choose to prioritize other things
* I'd like to have children eventually, but now just isn't a good time
* I'd have (more) children if my friends and neighbours would. (A social contagion effect that could help explain the post-WW2 euphoria baby boom? At least here the highest fertility was immediately after the war, when living conditions were still quite rough after wartime damage.)
etc.
I think there's also a relative economic argument to consider: in absolute terms having lots of kids might be quite affordable, even more so than in baby boom times; but having fewer children means not just getting to increase your income more but also keep more of it for yourself. Doing so might even be considered a necessity more than a luxury. In this country, for example, people are obsessed with buying their own property, encouraged by tax policy, and this requires years of saving for a down payment. Having a child or two might extend the required savings period by years. Renting a child-friendly apartment or small house in a minor city is thought of as throwing good money out the window, as opposed to cramming into a more attractively located matchbox. I wonder if birth rates here could be boosted by providing interest-free loans for down payments to families with children, enough to give them a substantial edge in the property market.
As an economist I lean toward the economics explanation, but more importantly don't see much milage in litigating the percentages. We know how to manipulate the relative cost of having children vs not having them. So lets look for the keys under the streetlight.
I would however push back at state provided childcare as the policy lever. A refundable child tax credit (US terminology) has the same relative price effects without distorting the decision about whether the childcare should be provided in or out of the home, formally or informally. by parents/family members or not.
A few weeks back Bryan Caplan - who advocates for larger families - suggested that no government has really tried pushing hard on the economic incentives. This is a very crude hearsay representation of his point, but here goes. Imagine if a government announced that, when you reach a certain age (35?), if you haven’t had any kids, you’ll pay DOUBLE the income tax rate of those who have had one or more kids. What’s more, if you’ve had more than two kids, you’ll live COMPLETELY TAX FREE.
I know we’re not yet at the point where any government could get elected with such a policy. But if the political climate changed, and such a policy was instituted, I can’t believe it would have no effect on the TFR. What do you think?
Within Country, conservative social values = higher TFR.
So I don't think liberal cultural values are causing high TFR. If I had to guess, liberal Northern Europe is just richer and more functional than Southern Europe due to genetics and that helps a lot.
There are also a few smart TFR policies in some Norther European countries.
The big problem is that getting higher TFR would mean big time subsidies and they have to be direct cash (not subsidized child care). The median voter is 55 years old and uninterested in child tax credits while girl bosses don't want to subsidize stay at home moms.
What you present is not *the* economic explanation. A macro-economic explanation is the transformation of average daily life (via industrialization) from a labor-intensive to a capital-intensive process. We no longer labor in the forest and field where a large family with lots of children can provide greater labor output and older children offset the cost of raising younger ones - we are in a capital-intensive framework where the limiting factor to family size is parental income, older children are not deemed capable of correctly educating younger children, children cannot work to offset the costs of their own upbringing, and financial investment in formal education is necessary for socio-economic success.
That explains the decrease in birth rates over the last 100 years, but it doesn't really explain the drop over the last 50 years.
Or the continuing severe drop over the past 10-20 years
I think the location of work plus the lack of housing in those locations is the biggest predictor of family size. Urban/suburban areas hold most of the jobs. Cost of rent/mortgage has skyrocketed, and affordable housing has not kept up.
Owning a house and securing a college education for your offspring was the dream of families in the 50's/60's.
The dream is not so appealing anymore.
Women still have a natural desire to have children. But it is getting harder to see motherhood as a positive in light of social media, modern journalism, and men expecting their wives to produce an income. Rejection of religion coupled with selfish grandparents don't help.
A possible link would be that more progressive countries have more immigrants from places with higher fertility rates, and these immigrants are the ones pushing the TFR up.
That's directionally true in many cases, but not a super-meaningful factor in France, which has an overall TFR of 1.9 and a native-born French TFR of 1.8.
Source: (https://www.ined.fr/fichier/s_rubrique/29430/population.and.societies.568.2019.fertility.france.immigrants.en.pdf).
The Nordic countries have taken in proportionally more immigrants than other European countries, and are seeing their TFR decline. In Denmark and Iceland, the native-born women actually have higher TFR than immigrants.
Source: https://unric.org/en/family-day-nordic-fertility-rates-in-steady-decline/
As a Western European - I see immigrant families have a lot of unemployed relatives they can count on for support. They also have much different standards in terms of what they ought to do to raise the children (lots of unsupervised outdoor play from quite a young age, no pressure to be in all the extra-curriculars).
I've always wanted to have a big family but for me, despite having a high earning husband, it's expensive because any break I get I have to pay for - hire a cleaner, meal service, or babysitter. There's very little in the way of hand-me-downs from relatives because hardly anyone is having kids. And there is a lot of social pressure to do everything better than previous generations (which is a lot of work): break the intergenerational chain of trauma, provide evidence-based enrichment toys&activities, organize playdates with appropriate peers, dress them 'aesthetic', nurse on demand, on and on it goes. My grandma had 7 kids but she put the babies in the attic so she wouldn't hear the crying. And opened a window near the playpen rather than take them to the park. And she didn't lose sleep pumping for milk when my dad was a hungry baby, the greengrocers wife simply nursed him, too.
I try to be sensible (no shame in kids sharing bedrooms, second-hand clothes, or showering weekly rather than daily), but it's still a lot for someone with zero support. I could make it easier on myself by doing cry-it-out and letting the streets raise my kids and bottle feeding, but am unwilling to accept the risks that go with that. And we've had to reinvent the wheel in terms of how to raise a child, because while we are aware of some dysfunctional stuff we don't want to repeat, there's so much conflicting information about what the *right* way is it's exhausting. So my family size is a lot smaller than I would have liked.
Another factor - I see quite a lot of men who want families, but in stead of dating women who want children too, they date the prettiest girl they can find for years and years waiting and hoping she'll come around.
And as a SAHM, I've personally been directly insulted and demeaned for that choice by other women (both working mothers and childless) because it's considered very uncool and low social status to be SAHM. So while many people believe children are better off with a SAHM, SAHMs are seen as losers... It's hard to experience that kind of rejection.
Another one - it's considered very uncool and even irresponsible to have a big family by many. My brother had both sets of grandparents (who had bigger families themselves) react negatively when he announced his second (despite being married & well-off), and I've heard many comments about how I should not have more kids after my second. Another social rejection thing.
I've read somewhere that policies like giving parents money when they have kids have the most direct measurable effect in encouraging the dredges of society to reproduce (drug addicts, families already monitored by CPS, mentally disordered assisted living, all that) but there's not much effect on functional, healthy & more independent families.
I would have liked to have a much bigger family. For me what would have helped:
- more support from family (practically, like meal trains, hand-me-downs and babysitting) - that's the main thing
- less hatred/judgement from neighbors
- having a regular income at an earlier age (we only started having kids when that was in order)
- less conflicting information == more comprehensive evidence-based info on how to not repeat the sins of our fathers re: childrearing&trauma (especially necessary for us because we had a high needs profoundly gifted firstborn and it took a lot of figuring out how to handle him, now that we've got the hang of that we might have a few more in quick succession before my eggs shrivel up).
Wow you basically wrote all of my thoughts on this subject in one comment. 🤣
But yeah I relate hard with the SAHMs being best for kids but also losers. It can occur in a single individual, who both praises me for the care I give my kids but urges me to get a job so I can remain independent. I think if she thinks from my kids’ POV, she wants me home. If she thinks from my interests, she wants me at work. It’s weird. We can’t win.
I personally think that this correlation ignores one factor: People afraid of their children being disadvantaged by giving births in a disadvantaged situation will have less children. And that is what those "conservative" value questions you point towards, point out. If you believe that children will be worse off, you will put it off, until you can afford to only have one person within the household work.
Similar to how people living in an urban area have less kids than those living in a rural area: the question of "Do I have space for a kid" makes people put off having kids, until they got enough space by moving into a larger apartment or out of the city.
There are so many factors which could be affecting fertility, and they may not be affecting it by the same amount in every case, and the interactions of multiple factors can get complicated very quickly.
For instance, population density definitely matters to some extent. Hong Kong has 6,900 people per square kilometre and TFR of 1.1 children per woman, while Norway has 15 people per square kilometre and a TFR of 1.6 children per woman. Bear in mind as well that 13% of Norwegians own a second home (a “hytte”) in the countryside. That comparison is evidence of a significant effect, but not as radical an effect as I’d expect if I thought population density would explain everything. I notice, BTW, that France, like the Nordic countries, has a relatively low population density (119 people per square km, though Paris is super-densely packed. The figure I got from googling Paris looks too high to be plausible - almost four times more densely packed than Hong Kong, which I can’t believe…).
In the UK, London is starting to approach Hong Kong levels of population density of the mid-1980s (5,700 people per square kilometre). Its TFR is 1.54 (close to where Hong Kong’s was in the mid-1980s), while the rest of England is 1.7. That’s a differential, but not a dramatic one. I suspect the reason it’s not so dramatic is, London is where the jobs and money are. If you live in London you can earn more money, but face more competition for housing, school places etc. If you live in the North East of England, you may have more space and cheaper housing, but less money.
Have you considered the hypothesis that birthrates simply decline as access to cheap, reliable birth control improves? I strongly suspect culture and economics normally only play a minor role, insofar as they affect the availability of birth control. (Though they may have influence at some extremes.)
[Edit: apologies if this came of as "just asking questions"; I was posting under pressure - there's a more-developed answer below]
That seems unlikely at very low TFRs, given that people in rich countries regularly report wanting more children than they actually have: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-global-fertility-gap
Why should we take this kind of survey data at face value? Among other weaknesses, surveys do not and can not pose the concrete trade-offs people have to make in real life.
This is especially strange because "cheap, high-quality contraception lowers fertility" used to be the null hypothesis, so well-substantiated that it was the primary plan of action for several agencies. The last time I searched for data on the topic, I could only find good statistics from NGOs trying to *reduce* fertility. From the 1960s through (at least) the 2000s, countless WHO and UN programs aimed to bring down the fertility rate in poor countries. Their primary strategy? Improving access to contraception.
Maybe this is just Simpson's paradox, or maybe there are other factors driving contraceptive access and low fertility in the same direction, but the intuitive, causal link between the two is strong and I *think* the data is strong, Here's a section summary from the paywalled article on Science Direct, "Contraception in historical and global perspective":
> [B]etween 1960 and 2003, the percentage of married women in developing regions using any form of contraception rose from approximately 10% to 60%, and fertility halved from six to three births per woman. In industrialized countries, contraceptive practice also rose and fertility fell, but changes were less dramatic because family sizes were already modest in 1960 and contraception was already well established.
I can understand saying, well, we can't (and don't want to) get the genie back into the bottle, so what can _improve_ fertility in a world with cheap, easily-accessible, effective contraception? But that's a different question than the one this post asks: "[t]he big question in natalism is about whether birthrates fall, primarily, because of culture. Or whether they fall because of economic factors." I don't see how we got to that framing without overlooking well-established historical data.
People may want kids, but they want kids less than they want other things.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S152169340800151X?via%3Dihub
Might one contributing factor to these correlations be that there is often a substantial gap between the values people report having and the values they live by in practice? In the wealthy Scandinavian city where I live, for example, the areas where people are most liberal about immigration are inevitably those with the most homogenous white population. And then there is white flight: Young progressives often buy their first apartments in the cheap suburbs where non-Western immigrants are in majority, but almost inevitably move to more affluent/whiter areas as soon as their single child is ready to move from daycare to school.
I think it'd be interesting to see correlations from studies asking personal questions alongside the generic ones, such as
* I'd like to have (more) children but at the moment I choose to prioritize other things
* I'd like to have children eventually, but now just isn't a good time
* I'd have (more) children if my friends and neighbours would. (A social contagion effect that could help explain the post-WW2 euphoria baby boom? At least here the highest fertility was immediately after the war, when living conditions were still quite rough after wartime damage.)
etc.
I think there's also a relative economic argument to consider: in absolute terms having lots of kids might be quite affordable, even more so than in baby boom times; but having fewer children means not just getting to increase your income more but also keep more of it for yourself. Doing so might even be considered a necessity more than a luxury. In this country, for example, people are obsessed with buying their own property, encouraged by tax policy, and this requires years of saving for a down payment. Having a child or two might extend the required savings period by years. Renting a child-friendly apartment or small house in a minor city is thought of as throwing good money out the window, as opposed to cramming into a more attractively located matchbox. I wonder if birth rates here could be boosted by providing interest-free loans for down payments to families with children, enough to give them a substantial edge in the property market.
As an economist I lean toward the economics explanation, but more importantly don't see much milage in litigating the percentages. We know how to manipulate the relative cost of having children vs not having them. So lets look for the keys under the streetlight.
I would however push back at state provided childcare as the policy lever. A refundable child tax credit (US terminology) has the same relative price effects without distorting the decision about whether the childcare should be provided in or out of the home, formally or informally. by parents/family members or not.
A few weeks back Bryan Caplan - who advocates for larger families - suggested that no government has really tried pushing hard on the economic incentives. This is a very crude hearsay representation of his point, but here goes. Imagine if a government announced that, when you reach a certain age (35?), if you haven’t had any kids, you’ll pay DOUBLE the income tax rate of those who have had one or more kids. What’s more, if you’ve had more than two kids, you’ll live COMPLETELY TAX FREE.
I know we’re not yet at the point where any government could get elected with such a policy. But if the political climate changed, and such a policy was instituted, I can’t believe it would have no effect on the TFR. What do you think?
Children are a lot of "work" for women. Our daughter has 2 boys (ages 3 and 7). They are extremely active.
The younger one goes to an excellent daycare at $18k/yr. His older brother got a good start on his education at the same daycare.
Her husband helps, but it is not 50/50.
Within Country, conservative social values = higher TFR.
So I don't think liberal cultural values are causing high TFR. If I had to guess, liberal Northern Europe is just richer and more functional than Southern Europe due to genetics and that helps a lot.
There are also a few smart TFR policies in some Norther European countries.
The big problem is that getting higher TFR would mean big time subsidies and they have to be direct cash (not subsidized child care). The median voter is 55 years old and uninterested in child tax credits while girl bosses don't want to subsidize stay at home moms.
You are long assertion and short evidence.