More Tiny Humans for the Glory of Our Kind!

by Will Wilkinson on June 16, 2008

The inestimable Kerry Howley’s outstanding Reason cover piece on fertility panics is now online. Like the typical Howley production, this is a super-readable combo of fascinating facts and trenchant analysis. Kerry’s great on why talk about “desired fertility” is silly, but I think she’s most insightful on the cultural aspects of fertility policy:

For those who, with good reason, worry about the solvency of transfer programs in an age of population decline, replacement immigration looks like a partial solution, and therefore xenophobia is part of the problem. But for many if not most of the people preoccupied by fertility rates, immigration is no solution at all. The question isn’t about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it’s about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn’s America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

[...]

At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.”

Spot on! The way I see it, those obsessed with fertility are people who think the culture they desire cannot possibly win the argument against competing cultures. So, they conclude, it’s down to brute baby-making force: the culture that wins the fertility war wins the culture war. In contrast, I think liberal market culture has such immense, salient rewards (wealth, longevity, happiness, etc.) that it is not only possible to win the argument, but that we are in fact winning it. Of course, part of the winning is dynamist cultural synthesis. So if you’ve got a conservative, zoological view of cultural preservation which fixes on the importance of high-fidelity copying of inessential aspects of a culture’s history (costumes, holidays, rites, cuisine, skin colors etc.), you’re going to have a hard time of it. But if you care about the essential core of liberal modernity, you should be delighted with how things are going. You’ll eat your szechuan taco pizza and you’ll love it.

Viewing 55 Comments

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    I found the article sadly incomplete, because it failed to explore at all one entirely reasonable explanation for fertility declines, one supported by data: social insurance reduces further economic incentives to have children. Instead of relying on one's children to support one in one's dotage, it becomes up to everyone's children to do so. This does create a free-rider problem.

    Of course, I can understand appreciation of the sort of positive liberty created by freeing oneself from dependence on one's children and one's family in general (though at the same time that removes a certain incentive for parents to treat children well, I suppose), but it's not entirely unsurprising that governments would attempt to boost fertility in response.

    Furthermore, as a counter argument, if "it is not only possible to win the argument, but that we are in fact winning it," and you expect immigrants to acclimatize, then that contradicts Howley's position; immigration becomes much less of a solution to the problem of social insurance, as both cultural assimilation and the economic impetus of the social insurance itself will encourage the immigrants to have lower fertility rates as well. Your robust faith therefore seems to argue that immigration is *not* a solution to the problem (while certainly not arguing for xenophobic responses.)
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    John, If I remember a conversation I once had with my colleague Jagadeesh Gokhale, who knows about as much about pension systems as anyone anywhere, there is a fertility effect from social insurance in a number of places like the U.S., but this is not especially big compared to the effect of people simply getting wealthier. Individual wealth and social insurance are both substitutes to intra-family transfers, but Soc Sec checks are small part of retirement income compared to savings and investments.

    More importantly, there is no general pattern across countries. Some places with no social insurance to speak of are declining sharply in fertility, and some places with lavish social insurance, such as France and Sweden, have relatively high birthrates. So social insurance isn't very helpful as a general explanation. I'm sure Kerry considered it, then left it out, because it isn't very illuminating.
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    Let's say some cultures are good (liberal market cultures, traditionalist ones, take your pick) and some others are bad. And let's say that in a fair fight, a good culture will beat out a bad one. Still, if certain assumptions hold -- if (a) the good culture constitutes a minority of the world's total population, (b) people acclimatize to new cultures slowly, and (c) local minorities tend to move towards the majority faster than vice versa, regardless of cultural quality -- then wouldn't mixing up the world's whole population at once mean that good culture will be swamped by bad? In other words, wouldn't the islands of good culture be something to be safeguarded, with entry occurring only as quickly as the process of assimilation would allow? (One could get even stronger results if it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the bunch.)
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    Your weakest premise is that conflict between cultures is an "argument."
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    http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=2082

    The Social Security debate is focused on mundane financial issues: transition costs, benefit adequacy, the value of the Social Security Trust Fund, and so on. The program’s long-term impact on individual economic choices is much more important but generally neglected. Completely unheard in the debate, however, is the program’s potential to affect fundamental choices about family formation. A new study by Michele Boldrin and colleagues examines the link between government-provided old-age pensions and the continual dramatic reduction in fertility throughout the developed world during the twentieth century. Its compelling evidence suggests an issue that deserves serious attention as policymakers consider the future of Social Security.
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    Boldrin's paper is available at http://www.micheleboldrin.com/Papers/fert&socse...
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    I think the bad premise is that there is actually a conflict, as opposed to the perception of a conflict. The self-appointed guardians of a culture need to invent the sense of a conflict in order to press uncooperative individuals, who want something outside the approved culture, back into line.
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    A couple additional comments:

    --Social Security isn't a small part of retirement income in the US. According to the SSA, it is the major source of income (providing 50% or more of total income) for 66% of the beneficiaries.

    --I think Howley ignores the evidence on the effects of social insurance programs not, as you suggest, because it is inconclusive (she cites a "plethora of explanatory narratives" but finds "none totally satisfying"--why not one more?), but because it might complicate the narrative she offers, in which pro-natal efforts and social democratic welfare state are opposed by the anti-natal libertarians (like you).

    --Howley doesn't seem to have any interest in figuring out what counts as an incentive to have children. Is public schooling an incentive?

    --Howley mentions in passing that in the US "ending the welfare state" is part of the pro-natal agenda. One sentence later she tells us that "Practically speaking, on the policy level, demographic panic is only useful for one purpose: the promotion of social welfare programs many social conservatives would oppose." Did she not bother to read her own article? Are there no other editors at Reason? (This is why I make the accusation I make above--there is a narrative that these sorts of pieces must fit, and this one fits.)

    --Is the psychological explanation you offer meant to explain the focus on demography in Singapore, France, Sweden, the US, Russia, Australia, Poland, Quebec, and Israel (to mention places noted in the article)? Why not think that, you know, actual demography is the concern? The demographic trends in these places are a more likely link than a universal and acultural psychological reaction, aren't they?

    --It seems to me that in the US most people focused on demography (people like Steyn, for example) are focused on it precisely as an issue of preserving the essential core of liberal modernity. That's why folks like Steyn spend so much time arguing about the threat that (they say) Islam and the increasing number of Muslims poses to gays in Europe. You can find the arguments unpersuasive, but there's no need to misrepresent them.
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    Middle class culture seems to have failed in Memphis. It failed for four generations of Mexican-Americans. Perhaps in some sense it is like numerous extinct species and does not "deserve" to persist and efforts to sustain it are doomed to failure. But I will not cheer its demise.

    Let's grant for the sake of argument that I and the demography-is-destiny crowd are bad people, while you cultural optimists are good people. Can you provide some evidence to believe that liberal culture will thrive and Phillip Longman's Return of Patriarchy (or something similarly dismal) will not?
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    Before the cartoon jihad, I would have been in agreement with this essay; not only in agreement, but in strong agreement. Since then, I have changed my mind about a few things. First, "liberal market culture" might be winning in the USA, but European cultures are not winning: immigrants to western Europe do not want to assimilate -- but I cannot blame them, since I escaped from western Europe myself. Second, the intelligentsia does not give a damn about dependency ratios, material welfare, etc: for them, immigration is only useful because it enables them to brand their political opponents as racists; that is the main, if not the *only* reason to oppose immigration.

    On one thing I have not changed my mind: the success of the kind of culture that I want to see around me, is not guaranteed. The kind of culture that I want to see is not very different from that of Victorian Britain, when allowances are made for technological progress; but there is no culture in western Europe that repels me more than modern English culture.
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    Howley mentions in passing that in the US "ending the welfare state" is part of the pro-natal agenda. One sentence later she tells us that "Practically speaking, on the policy level, demographic panic is only useful for one purpose: the promotion of social welfare programs many social conservatives would oppose."

    As is noted repeatedly in the article, pro-natalist social conservatives and social democrats tend to worry about declining birthrates for entirely different reasons. Those seeking to expand the welfare state tend to be much more successful in the realization of their policy goals, though their policy goals may not be shared by social conservatives also concerned about fertility decline. Nowhere in the piece do I say that "ending the welfare" state is part of one, unified "pro-natal agenda." Pro-natalists who have political power generally want just the opposite.

    I think Howley ignores the evidence on the effects of social insurance programs not, as you suggest, because it is inconclusive (she cites a "plethora of explanatory narratives" but finds "none totally satisfying"--why not one more?), but because it might complicate the narrative she offers, in which pro-natal efforts and social democratic welfare state are opposed by the anti-natal libertarians (like you).

    Surely both Will and I would be favorably disposed to an argument that faulted social security for endangering other transfer programs (by discouraging the production of the people needed to fund said programs. ) But this is a story about global fertility rates, and many of the countries where fertility is falling fastest have no social security to speak of. Social insurance surely plays some small part in the demographic transition from high to low fertility in middle income countries, but the overall effect is too inconsequential to mention in a piece of this length.
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    Your response basically says that pro-natal conservatives don't have any political influence in the US, which may be true.

    On the second bit, I'd think that libertarians might fault social security not just for endangering other transfer programs, but I confess that my Reason subscription has lapsed. I continue to think that an article that found room for "lad magazines" as an explanation might have found room for social welfare programs.
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    Thomas, You're right that SS plays a fairly large role in many people's retirement income. But I think I'm now remembering Gokhale's broader point, which I think was that social insurance is to a large extent a substitute for self-insurance. If you reduce social insurance, the savings rate will just go up, and you'll end up in basically the same place in terms of demand for intra-family transfers. So the effect on family formation is small. Anyway, I should look that up.
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    I should have added in the above comment that this divide is U.S.-specific. In Europe you've obviously got nationalist traditionalists who support generous payments to mothers.
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    Aha! We just had a fire alarm and I talked to Jagadeesh outside. He seemed to me to say (I don't want to commit him to my interpretation of it) the important thing is assurance of future consumption. Any credible mechanism that assures people of consumption in old age should reduce demand for kids, other things equal.. Social insurance can do that. But forced savings (aka, privatization) should have much the same effect. Many developing countries have no real social insurance, but are declining in fertility fast. In those cases part of the explanation may be improvement in savings and investment mechanisms. Anyway, the key is confidence in providing for the future. If either social insurance or sound financial institutions helps to produce that, it should affect fertility.
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    Will and Kerry,

    Megan linked to this NBER paper on the subject. It agrees, as do I, that increased access to capital markets does play a role in the reduction of fertility, about half-- but it also finds that the structure of social insurance accounts for the other half across a broad cross-section of countries, both rich and poor. There are some other effects in poor countries too, notability reduced child mortality meaning that you don't need extra children as "insurance" to insure that as many will survive to support you.

    "More importantly, there is no general pattern across countries. Some places with no social insurance to speak of are declining sharply in fertility, and some places with lavish social insurance, such as France and Sweden, have relatively high birthrates."

    You have merely pointed to exceptions that prove the rule (in the true sense of the phrase.) The countries with lavish social insurance but relatively high birthrates provide large incentives (financial and otherwise, such as benefits) to boost the fertility rate and make up for part of the effect of social insurance programs. The effect from the social insurance programs is still there, but there are counterbalancing effects by the government specifically to address the free-rider problem.

    Agree that forced savings under a privatized system would have a similar effect, though.
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    "I should have added in the above comment that this divide is U.S.-specific. In Europe you've obviously got nationalist traditionalists who support generous payments to mothers."

    The child tax credit does exist in the US, no, and has been expanded recently, yes? People to whom it appeals in the US obviously do exist, though not to the same degree in number or political power as in Europe, perhaps.
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    I optimistically clicked on a link to come here, but unfortunately I find a typical shallow libertarian gloss. A fertility conservative (to coin a phrase) is concerned about two things you don't seem to understand: 1) Cultural and civilizational struggles don't typically play out as "arguments". The Israeili Jews didn't win an argument with the Arabs in Palestine, the white man didn't win an argument with the red man in America, the barbarians didn't win an argument with the Romans in Europe, etc. Many such struggles are won largely by demographic force. 2) Culture is more than superficial traits. If you think the only thing that distinguishes an Asian from a European from an African is "rites, cuisine, [and] skin color" you are quite mistaken. There are biological aspects to culture; exactly how deep these go is not clear, but the very possibility of their existence cautions us to proceed carefully with demographic changes.
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    The other objection that I have to this post, which doesn't reflect a failure to understand on your part but rather perhaps a difference in values, is that putting our culture up for "argument" isn't something I particularly want to do- surely the best outcome from my point of view is not guaranteed if it is so put up. It is entirely possible that freedom of speech will "lose the argument" against supression of "offensive" speech. It is entirely possible that freedom of religion will "lose the argument" against Islamic theocracy. It is entirely possible that female emancipation will "lose the argument" against patriarchy. But I don't want those things to happen! And one way to help prevent those things from happening is to preserve a place in the world where those things I value can flourish, and one way to do that is to not import into that place large numbers of people who are already culturally predisposed against those values.
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    So let us save liberalism by being illiberal, yes? Splendid.

    But apart from that hypocrisy, what evidence is there that "importing" people from illiberal cultures makes us illiberal and not the the other way around?
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    mghertner wrote:
    "So let us save liberalism by being illiberal, yes? Splendid."

    Neither immigration controls nor inducements to childbearing are "illiberal" under any definition that would have made sense to our founders (or to me).

    "what evidence is there that "importing" people from illiberal cultures makes us illiberal and not the the other way around?"

    Not sure what "the other way around" would be, but for examples of immigration leading to illiberal practices, simply look around (or read Mark Steyn's book). Why is there female circumcision in Britain, or polygamy in Canada and the US?
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    Putnam elaborates on his celebrated work on social capital—defined most simply as social networks upon which people depend. He analyzes material from a large, nationwide study of ethnic diversity c