Why Governments Can't Even Pay People To Have More Children - And Why No One Should Be Mystified

                                                                                 

                        Isaac Asimov: Feb. 1976, Queen's Park Theater, Barbados

"It is now the willingly childless woman who is the heroine of our planet. She is the one who now deserves all the kudos and praise, for helping to do what is necessary to spare humanity from the ravages of over-population"

    

An astonishing fact of modern history is taking hold:  No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids. Many are opting to have no kids at all. What gives?  Is the human race on the verge of self- annihilation owing to population collapse?  Nope. In fact the opposite is true, we are on track to hit 10 billion by the year 2050, it's just that the majority will be in 3rd world (i.e. African, Asian) nations.

According to an article in 'Population Connection' (March) the U.S. birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. 

In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.

The drop has frightened lawmakers and commentators alike, as I have noted in previous posts, e.g.

• Can We Please Lose The Hysteria Over The "Baby Bust"?

Noting:

You do not generate more people to support the existing people - old or other.  The rational response is not to generate more American babies but to expand immigration to allow more workers from other nations - who seek work and have essential skills  - to enter the country and provide the needed economic support-  on a guest worker visa or basis. 

Adding:

Every baby born here in the U.S. creates a carbon footprint three times the size of that for a child born in the third world.  In other words, each American baby born disproportionately increases the Earth's overshoot pace.   If anything we need to reduce our numbers even below the replacement rate.   

This is something Americans need to wrap their heads around. Contrary to Right wing propaganda immigrants have helped cap inflationary pressures by expanding the workforce, despite falling birthrates, and will boost growth and public finances for years. One recent estimate (WSJ, WaPo, FT)  found that the above-trend immigration from this year and last will boost potential growth by around 0.3 percentage point to 2.1% in 2024.  This means the rational solution to lower child numbers in the U.S. is to allow more immigration to fill jobs Americans won't take and don't want.

Indeed, historically, migrants from nations as diverse as India, Mexico and the Caribbean, have flocked to such jobs as the supply of local workers willing (and able) to do them has shrunk. Jobs such as elder care, construction, landscaping and crop harvesting.  Thus, in many ways the 'child birth' crisis is an artificial and manufactured one.

This despite headlines warning of a coming “demographic crisis” or “Great People Shortage” as different (mainly Western) economies find themselves without enough young workers to fill jobs and pay taxes. To stem the tide, the world’s leaders have tried everything from generous social welfare programs to pink-and-blue awareness campaigns to five-figure checks to veiled threats, all to relatively little avail.   Why of little avail? Because they are not sustainable over the long duration of child rearing.   What is really required? 

 Long term FREE child care. No mere subsidies!

Long term free child education as well as nutritional support (for at risk families) 

Long term (i.e. 3 months) PAID family leave available each year for either parent.

Sounds "socialistic"? Yeah, so what? That is what's needed if you wish to entice more couples to reproduce!

Still, Trent MacNamara, a history professor at Texas A&M who has written about fertility rates, blabbed in the piece:

“Even the richest, savviest, most committed governments have struggled to find policies that produce sustained bumps in fertility. If such policies were discoverable, I think someone would have discovered them.”

Newsflash, Prof!  They are there in plain view as I've listed above. But the Rightists in the various nations just don't want to pay up. But they still want to squawk and bellyache about parents not having enough kids - to work so they can cut taxes for the rich.

We also read in the POP Conn piece that:

"The failure of dozens of often very expensive pronatalist policies to produce much of a return has policymakers and observers alike wondering whether there’s any way for governments to convince their citizens to have more babies. If not, what should lawmakers should be doing instead to help societies adapt to a demographically changing world?"

First,  these 'po-natalist' policies are not generous enough!

They are more in the line of grudging one-off 'bones' tossed to get the hoi polloi to breed more and faster to support an economy based on grift, cheap money and speculation in the stock market - as well as leverage and stock buybacks.  In the end the entire financial structure operates as a huge charade, much like the blackjack tables in Vegas.  That is why the most these governments do is offer a tax credit maybe, or parental time off - IF you take it out of your 401(k) savings.  It's a big laugher.  As for child care, good luck ! Yer on yer own!

Besides which, in many ways, the falling birth rate is a success story — the result of young people, especially women, having more options and freedoms than ever before. For example, women are better able to control their fertility than in decades past.  Prior to the fall of Roe, teen births and unintended births were on the decline, and the use of highly effective contraception methods was on the rise.  

Of course, that may not last if too many are stupid or politically ignorant enough to put Trump back into the Oval Office.  Because the first thing his MAGA mutts in the House will try to do is cut existing programs like food stamps, and then impose a national abortion ban before they go after contraception. (Either passing laws nullifying insurance claims for it, or making it so expensive -  via draconian commerce bills - that most women will either give up or go back to the methods of old:  no sex for thee.)

Of course, fewer births do have real consequences for how families and societies operate. In 2010, for example, there were more than seven family members available to care for each person over the age of 80; by 2030, there will be only four. An aging society also means fewer workers in key industries and fewer people paying into programs like Social Security.   But that is precisely why labor rules for migrants need to be relaxed.  Because there in are the workers to not only resolve ongoing labor shortages but also providing a larger base of workers to support Social Security.

 Of course, Trump's hero Viktor Orban won't hear of it, declaring that "migration is surrender" and Hungarians must have more children.  Never mind the inflation rate for bread, eggs etc. leaves them barely able to feed the brood they have.

In the US, meanwhile, rhetoric aimed at getting people to have more children can ring hollow given a racist history in which white motherhood has been lauded while Black women’s fertility has been viewed as disordered and suspect, to the point that Black women have been forcibly sterilized. In a country where Black women die in childbirth at nearly three times the rate of white women, it’s impossible to hear calls to increase the birth rate without questioning who they’re really aimed at.

This is why equitable family-friendly policies in the U.S. must also include investment in health care for Black women, including maternal mental health and generous family leave and free child care.  Any discussion of fertility and birth rates also needs to address the safety of children, including overpolicing, racist violence, and the spiking rate of gun deaths. 

In the end, current efforts at reform to family policy are not likely to go anywhere soon, given most reproductive age people are intelligent enough to grasp what serious parenthood involves.   That is why at minimum these would be parents expect the state to do more,  i.e. paid family leave, free govt child care and education. Minus those more kids is a deal breaker.  Don't like it?  Then allow more immigrants in to support the economy.

Countries may find themselves needing to adapt, both economically and socially, to an aging population, but in nearly every case that will now entail allowing much larger migration. 

 See also:

• "To Breed Or Not To Breed?" The Answer Ought To Obvious By Now...

And:

The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason.

Excerpt:

Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world.

That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. 

And:

• Of Course Ten Billion Population Is Unsustainable ...