Why we’re not having enough children
Up until recently, countries like Finland, Sweden and Norway had notably higher fertility rates than many countries in southern Europe. The Nordic socioeconomic model, with its mixture of gender egalitarianism and strong welfare-state supports for child rearing, was often held up as proof that progressive policies could prop up birthrates, even that feminism is the new natalism.
That hope seems to be dissolving. As Darel Paul wrote in an essay for Compact magazine last week, Europe has suffered a “stunning fertility collapse” in the past decade, much of it concentrated in countries where the feminist egalitarian model was strongest.
In Finland, for example, the country’s birthrate has dropped by almost a third since 2010. Its birthrate is now almost as low as Italy’s.
Cultural and cognitive
America can learn from the European experience that policy can shape fertility decisions and work against anti-natal trends. But it’s always been clear that pro-natalist legislation is expensive and works primarily on the margins. The right policy might get you from 1.5 children per couple up to 1.7, or from 1.1 to 1.3, an outcome that’s both very much worth aiming for, but also potentially swamped by larger trends.
Whatever is going on in countries like Finland, says Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch, “it’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.” Let’s talk for a moment about the cultural and psychological aspect, the role of people’s thinking about the world in their fertility decisions.
Consider, first, the case that contemporary attitudes are explicitly anti-natal and the too-many-humans worldview infuse modern society in a profound and under-indexed way. In this theory, people aren’t having kids because (in the words of one critic) they think too many people are “wrecking the planet,” encouraging young people to “believe having children is bad.”
I’m a little doubtful. It’s notable that the critic’s evidence starts with online reader comments in major newspapers. That tracks with my sense that once Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” 1968 prophecies of doom failed to materialize, his worldview became a kind of submerged ideology — present below the surface of liberal society, influential with many older liberals who imbibed it in the 1970s, but a bit too embarrassingly out of date and even racist-seeming to be a full part of official progressive ideology.
It can still be a meaningful force, and to some extent the specter of climate change has given Ehrlichism new life. But the no-kids-because-of-global-warming narrative seems less about overpopulation per se and instead about a pessimism about one’s children’s prospects in a warming world.
But before giving pride of place to that kind of pessimism in our explanations, it’s worth looking at a different ideological force: not the anti-natalism of despair but the anti-natalism of bourgeois propriety.