Where’d the kid(s) go?
I ran into a dad-friend while dropping my son off at school today. We chatted about the (surprising) amount of parental involvement for our kindergarten aged children— spelling tests, craft supply acquisition, a huge schedule of future events to navigate — and how he and his wife were finding it difficult to juggle with working and their newborn. I could only nod in empathy, because we have only Kid, and he is at the age (5) where things are infinitely easier than with a newborn. It got me to thinking again about the sustained level of investment that children nowadays represent; it’s a thought that have kept Mr. Main Street and I teetering between becoming parents to a newborn again and remaining content with the status quo (of one child), thank you.
No doubt, kids have always been an investment of sorts. Maybe back in the day of farming and sharecropping they were more of a front-weighted biological investment (of mostly maternal health) for the first several years, but they represented an economic security, a statistical buttress against the ravages of disease and bad luck, a kind of “upside surprise,” that could begin to return dividends in about a decade. By the time I was born in the 80’s, childhood represented a much longer period of investment. Formal schooling, extra-curricular activities, clothes, shoes, books, blah blah blah, all to turn Side Street into Main Street. I didn’t personally get out of formal schooling until I was in my late 20s, owing to professional (medical) school. Kids are expensive. They eat resources. So it’s no surprise that as people acquire the ability to choose the number of kids they have, they have fewer than otherwise:
The upshot? Fertility rates have declined dramatically, from 3.34 children born/woman in 1960, to 1.60 in 2020.
And anecdotally, this is true too. I was a hyperactive only child but recall my classmates having (many) siblings. I was generally the odd one out in my class of 26–30 kids for years. In my son’s class today, about a third are only children. Out of our social group, many couples have children, but no more than two children; it is increasingly rare for us to come across a family with three or more kids in it. Replacement rate — the fertility rate required to keep a population generally stable, is 2.1 children/woman. And most women, myself included, are not having 2.1 kids each.
This is bad for countries, as a whole. The kids of today are the economy of tomorrow. A country’s riches are its people. There is almost no amount of productivity gain in a modern economy that can offset a drop in population; the lifetime contribution to GDP of one person is tremendous. As Nick Hanauer (a self-described Rich Person in this documentary) says, even Rich People, who can afford many pillows, only sleep on one or two pillows. Countries, no matter your flavor of governance — capitalist or communist, need people.
So why on earth are governments doing everything possible to discourage the making and keeping of little people? This is not about reproductive rights — I am firmly pro-choice. I am talking about the escalating difficulty of investing in children. Hurdles like the rising costs of housing, healthcare, food and job flexibility weigh heavily on everyone in society (except the rich) but the incremental penalty on those who choose to be parents is multiplied by the number of little bodies they choose to have. The twin cudgels of astronomical childcare and education costs are also unique to parents, to say nothing of the relentless subliminal messaging that children are a burden to society in a way that pets and the elderly never are.
Let us posit that going from 0 to 1 child is a very big mental ask. An exercise that, thanks to the glories of modern medicine, only a proportion of couples consider undertaking. There is probably not much a government can do to increase the proportion of people going from 0 to 1, and really, this represents progress: people who do not want children should not have children. Because raising kids is hard, and the trajectory of your life necessarily changes. I submit, though, that what governments do have the ability to do, is convince those with 1 to have more than one. While it’s not for me to advocate for the unfettered return of Malthusian population growth (explosion), at least targeting replacement rate is the least disruptive course of action. The most rational.
If you already have one kid, chances are you like them well enough, and if the circumstances were right, you’d do it all over again. Economic policies should be aimed at easing the burden of having kid #2 or kid #3, and if you’re clever about how you design incentives, you might even convince more to go from 0 to 1 kid. Developed democracies (Japan, Spain, Italy) and Autocraties (China) alike struggle with this, and neither seems to have figured out the formula to nudge the fertility rate back to 2.1, save Israel, which has consistently seen its fertility rate north of 3.0 since 2011. So what is going on?
Populations are in decline because of death-by-a-thousand-cuts: raising kids is hard, and when everything else seems hard enough already, choosing another hard thing when you can spare yourself inconvenience requires a remarkable amount of optimism, that is in short supply, globally. Only societies in decay fail to celebrate and the encourage the optimism of youth. When life looks like a slog all through, when it feels like your only value to society as a whole is the window of time that you can grind your imagination, health, and intellect to the bone, you start looking for alternatives. Rational actors are voting against society by refusing to participate in it, much less propagate it with a partner.
Children, and other economically non-productive units of the population play second-fiddle to the economically productive — taxpaying adults- and a not-so-subtle messaging about this division and hierarchy is broadcast widely throughout most modern societies. And before we argue this is a necessary distinction, economically speaking, there is nothing in political economy which insists that governments craft policy with a willful blindness to the fact that the vast majority of all people will transition between these categories, criss-crossing between them during life’s milestones and stages: from needing care, to independence, to giving care, and finally needing it once again. I’m planting my flag in the sand (easy to do when it’s nearly impossible to collect data, amirite?): Policies which make the transitions smoother, and less punishing will eventually succeed in boosting the fertility rate. One expensive, valuable, bundle at a time.