On demography and the patriarchy

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and embrace demographic collapse.

I recently listened to an excellent podcast hosted by my old high school friend Dan Kurtz-Phelan in which Nicholas Eberstadt gave an interview about rapidly declining global fertility rates and the coming age of depopulation. He painted a picture of global fertility that was much starker than I had previously appreciated - in addition to the well known low fertility rates in Europe and east Asia, he highlighted decreasing fertility in societies as diverse as Southeast and Southern Asia, Subsaharan Africa and Latin America. The birthrate in Thailand is down to 1 birth per woman per lifetime. In India, the birth rate in Calcutta (Kolkata) is now under 1. Mexico has a lower birthrate than the US, and is well under replacement. Even Subsaharan Africa, with the highest fertility in the world, is seeing a precipitous decline, with birthrates dropping by over a third since 1980. And this is to say nothing of countries like Japan and Korea, with birthrates under 1, who are already staring into a demographic abyss.

In the interview they explore potential causes of this collapse in fertility, but the universality of the collapse eludes any particular social, geographic or economic factor. Rather, it seems that women (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, men) everywhere are deciding that either they don’t want children or they want very few. Eberstadt argues very persuasively that dropping fertility rates comes down simply to a desire for a smaller (or nonexistent) family. It seems to me that a fast enough decrease in fertility can create a vicious cycle as well - it becomes harder to raise children in a society with relatively few businesses and social services geared towards children and parents, which further discourages would-be parents from entering into the chaotic world of childrearing. If you live in a neighborhood without a day care or playground you have fewer resources to help you parent. Conversely, if your friends and neighbors are all having children you are much more likely to decide to do so yourself. I’m fairly convinced in retrospect that the main reason my wife and I decided to have 3 kids instead of stopping at 2 was that the two couples we were closest with at the time both had 3 kids.

My sense is that this precipitous decline in fertility is a natural consequence of the centuries-long*** project of liberal democracy. Women (and men), freed from the shackles of institutionalized religion, given agency, autonomy, financial independence, and access to reproductive health care, are able to decide for themselves how many children they want to bear. Young adults across the world seem to be giving a fairly definitive answer.

The exceptions really prove the rule here. Some of the only areas with fertility rates above replacement are those with patriarchal and religion-based expectations around the proper role of women in relation to family formation. Israel is the only wealthy country with a stable fertility rate above replacement, driven largely by the orthodox Jewish community. The Mormon community in the western US has maintained above replacement fertility, and areas of religious Muslim populations have done the same.

While this desire for smaller families may in fact be in the best interest of women finally making their own reproductive choices - and I think we should all trust women to make the best choices for their own lives - it creates major challenges for the larger society. We are already seeing the effects of demographic collapse in countries like Japan and Korea. Entire villages emptied out due to depopulation. Financing of social programs strained by fewer and fewer workers contributing to them. A society with a birthrate well under replacement is a society that requires a fundamentally different political economy to survive. At a minimum this would require major changes in how the country is run, how services are financed, and how immigration is managed.

Like every subject these days, the discourse around declining fertility has been sharply polarized, and I think both sides are wrong. Those on the right see declining fertility as prima facie evidence that the entire liberal democratic project was a failure. Improving women’s reproductive freedom and autonomy in the setting of decreasing religiosity in everyday life has led to societal collapse. The answer to those on the right is simply that we have to go back to an era when societal norms and expectations for women were more explicitly focused on family formation.

Women who forego childbearing are derided as “childless cat ladies” by the Douthat-Vance wing of the right. Glorification of the olden days is in vogue on the right-coded corners of the internet, with wistful descriptions of what was possible on a single (implicitly male) income in the 1950s, and a renewed interest in antiquity, seen everywhere from calls to “Retvrn”, to the internet-driven Trad Wife movement, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Romanesque (and IMO pretty ugly) new hairdo. This movement fundamentally seeks a return to patriarchy and a clawing back of individual liberty and autonomy for women, which I find fairly abhorrent.

Conversely, to some on the left, depopulation is a feature and not a bug. Instead of looking to technological advances to fight climate change, the degrowth movement looks to reduce total human energy consumption. Having fewer people on the planet through demographic collapse fits nicely into this ideology. However, to put it mildly, I think this view is fairly naive about how damaging the effects of shrinking population will be on human development, economic prosperity and quality of life.

To others on the left with a more moderate view, decreased fertility simply represents a technocratic problem for which there must be a technocratic fix. If only we had child care subsidies, better parental leave or a more generous child tax credit we could increase the fertility rate. This has been tried in various forms in various developed countries with limited success (Sweden for example has very generous policy measures for parents yet has a fertility rate stuck below replacement). These efforts have failed because young men and women aren’t foregoing family formation because they calculated the costs and subsidies associated with child-rearing on a spreadsheet and decided it didn’t pencil out. They are choosing not to have children because they don’t want to have them.

There must be a third way here - where the basic principles of a liberal democracy, autonomy and women’s rights are upheld, but childbearing is seen and promoted as a fundamentally valuable and prosocial activity. I am not sure what the best political framing of this is, but such a project would have to be fundamentally cultural rather than political.

One insight I can offer from my own life: after I finished my residency training I was deciding between a few jobs - one that would allow us to stay in San Francisco and allow my wife to keep working a job she enjoyed; the others would force us to move to a lower cost-of-living area where my wife would be hard pressed to find a job. As an educated liberal woman living in a liberal city, she felt an implicit (and sometimes explicit) expectation that it would be an abrogation of her female independence if she left her prestigious job for the sake of her husband’s career. However, because my wife admirably doesn’t give a fuck about what other people think, she chose to leave her job and has not worked regularly since. We both feel incredibly happy and fulfilled in our current situation. I’m certain if we had stayed in SF we would have limited our family to 1-2 children and struggled to raise them as we both worked full-time in a lived environment that was not built for raising children. We are both glad that she did not listen to the social pressure weighing on her as she made that decision - raising our three children has been the most enjoyable and meaningful experience in our lives. It makes me profoundly sad that many are choosing to avoid this experience altogether.