Article: Fertility Collapse Demands New Cultures

[Ken]

Just off the top of my head, all of these things would make it easier for families:

Josh addressed these in terms of increasing birthrates (or not). Let me present some economic factors as well.

1. Higher minimum wages or wages in general so that it would be easier for working people to support families, especially with one primary earner.

This fuels inflation, which makes it harder for working people to support families.

2. Better childcare options so that childcare is cheaper and more available. It is punitively expensive to find childcare in many US cities so people know they can't afford children and still keep some kind of working career.

If you're going to increase the wages of childcare providers in 1., how is the cost going to decrease?

3. More affordable health care options. With the ACA things are better now than in the past, but it can still be very expensive, especially if you have a sick child. Even childbirth itself can be extremely expensive if you don't have insurance

Sounds like you're on the same page as Josh here, especially in terms of birth costs.

4. Cheaper housing. The cost of housing is getting astronomical in many parts of the country which prevents people from having families, or from having larger families. This is mostly due to policy like zoning that drive up the cost of housing. Other countries don't do this. Housing costs in say Japan are 1/2 what they are here.

Housing sizes in Japan are 1/2 what they are here, too, so that plays a role. But there are some areas with housing costs that are still fairly reasonable.

5. Better transportation options. Cars are getting increasingly expensive and unaffordable yet this country is extremely car dependent. There are lots of people who can't afford families because all their disposable income goes to transportation expenses. We could do a better job of providing alternatives.

Choosing transportation over family sounds like badly misplaced priorities.

6. Cheaper higher education options so families aren't burdened by enormous college costs and young people aren't burdened by enormous college debts. Both of those things discourage having children.
7. Promoting marriage since married people are more likely to have children and raise them successfully than single people.
8. You could list a whole lot of other things that would make our communities more child friendly. Less crime and drugs on the streets, physically safer streets with more pedestrian options, parks, playgrounds, etc. to make our built environment more child friendly, more things like after school programs for kids.

These are getting better, especially if "programs" can be translated to "parenting."

The list is endless.

It is indeed.

Honestly I don't have any expectation that social welfare programs that would actually provide meaningful help to working families would ever get implemented in this country. I'm not naive. Conservatives who give performative lip service to family values would never sit still for any policies that would increase tax rates on the wealthy. Because that is where their true loyalties lie.

In any event, none of this is really theoretical. Depending on how you want to count, there are at least 30 modern wealthy industrialized countries in the world who have all experimented with a wide variety of social welfare policies intended to make the lives of families easier. We can look around the world and see what actually works and what doesn't. We don't need to guess.

And if you want to see more families, the first step is to make life easier for families. That is a fundamental principle of economics. Incentivize the behaviors you want to encourage. Disincentivize the behaviors you wish to discourage.

Moralizing about it isn't going to accomplish a thing.

[Franklin]

The needed cultural features for population growth are being depleted not just in Mennonite/Anabaptist circles but all over the world as traditional cultures become absorbed into mainstream culture.

Why do you say this? Conservative Mennonites and Amish are growing in population because they reject mainstream culture.

As for mainstream culture, the sooner it goes extinct, the better.

[AndersonD]

My wife and I have six children in one of the most expensive cities in the US but I don't know how well our experiences translate to public policy. Making this work on a single blue collar wage has required choices not everyone is ready to embrace. The largest accommodation is to re-adjust expectations around the size and quality of housing.

I would agree with this. It seems reasonable to expect a similar standard of living to the 1950s to me, in terms of size of house, square footage and so on.

Medical costs are the second largest area of concern. Our life would not be possible without Obamacare and subsidized medical insurance.

I don't agree with this. Swartzentrubers, as I pointed out earlier, have the largest family size in America, yet they eschew all subsidised medical insurance. They do not, generally speaking, have worse health (similar to the surrounding non-Swartzie population, one study showed slightly better mental health). It is thus not accurate to say "our life would not be possible". Rather, some expectations may need to change.

One of the expectations that would need to change is fresh food. The Swartzentrubers often dumpster dive due to their poverty.

[Josh]

Imagine if we took some of the wealth of this country and instead of transferring it directly to the wealthiest 0.1% and foreign oligarchs like we do now, we instead decided to invest in making life easier and better for working families. And even if population doesn’t increase, working families just had better lives. The horror!

The wealthy, globalist elites control politics, elections, and business; I do not imagine that they are going to somehow just start sharing their wealth with working families anytime soon.

One thing you can be sure of, present trends are not going to continue. The Swartzentruber are not going to take over the world (or the US) and the US population will not shrink to zero or probably even shrink. It is still increasing.

The present decrease in birthrates seems to be a trend that does indeed continue. Eventually the low birthrate cultures simply cease to exist. By 2100, Swartzentrubers (assuming they retain their culture which gives them high birth rates) do seem indeed on track to overtake a lot of other "heritage" Americans, not to mention numerous other immigrant groups whose birth rates plummet by the 2nd or 3rd generation. (Hasids will be right behind them.)

Everything reaches an equilibrium. The policies I cited will simply influence to a lesser or greater degree what that new equilibrium will be.

The policies you cited have had no impact at all on making birth rates rise, and indeed countries that have them have lower birth rates than a place like America that lacks some of them or doesn't have them to the same degree.

The "equilibrium" may indeed be that cultures that value having children eventually replace cultures that don't value it.

[Josh]

Honestly I don't have any expectation that social welfare programs that would actually provide meaningful help to working families would ever get implemented in this country. I'm not naive. Conservatives who give performative lip service to family values would never sit still for any policies that would increase tax rates on the wealthy. Because that is where their true loyalties lie.

There is zero empirical evidence that social welfare programs make birthrates increase, and quite a bit showing it makes them decrease.

In any event, none of this is really theoretical. Depending on how you want to count, there are at least 30 modern wealthy industrialized countries in the world who have all experimented with a wide variety of social welfare policies intended to make the lives of families easier. We can look around the world and see what actually works and what doesn't. We don't need to guess.

And if you want to see more families, the first step is to make life easier for families. That is a fundamental principle of economics. Incentivize the behaviors you want to encourage. Disincentivize the behaviors you wish to discourage.

Social factors don't really run on "economic" principles. As I pointed out earlier, Swartzentruber birth rates don't track the overall economy. It is worth pondering why that is. It should be rather obvious that cultures that don't allow good or bad economic conditions to dictate their family size will eventually dominate over cultures that do.

[Josh]

I doubt it has much at all to do with a "modern world view"

It is simple economics. In a rural agrarian society, additional children are an economic benefit because they provide endless free labor on the farm. Whether we are talking about 19th century America, rural China in the 1980s, or Niger today.

Every country that moves from an agrarian society to an urbanized industrial society goes through the exact same demographic shift regardless of values or world view.

It is a bogus worldview that condenses people down to rational economic actors. It is rather obvious that most people are not actually fungible economic units.

An obvious example would be why Swartzentrubers choose to keep their current culture instead of doing what is more "economic" (although I would argue that, in the long term, they are more economically rational as they seem to be able to acquire and hold on to large amounts of land in contexts where other people are unable to hold on to land or acquire and hold on to affordable housing).

In a non-agrarian industrial economy every additional child is an economic cost.

This would seem to mean that industrial economies are a dead end and will eventually make themselves go extinct. I mean, a culture that considers children a "cost" or an economy that does will eventually price having children out of existence. We can already see this in an advanced stage in Korea and Japan.

[mike]

The needed cultural features for population growth are being depleted not just in Mennonite/Anabaptist circles but all over the world as traditional cultures become absorbed into mainstream culture.

Why do you say this? Conservative Mennonites and Amish are growing in population because they reject mainstream culture.

As for mainstream culture, the sooner it goes extinct, the better.

Conservative Anabaptists are still growing in overall population but the trends are toward smaller and smaller families. They are on the same path as mainstream culture in this regard, even if they are not as far down the road. They are obviously not anywhere near the point of not replacing their population, but if current trends continue, it could theoretically happen.

When I say that the needed cultural features for growth are being depleted, I would specifically say that there is increasingly a negative stigma attached to having a large family even among CA groups. Large families are viewed sometimes as being irresponsible or lazy (in the same sense as not mowing your lawn is irresponsible or lazy), not taking proper care of one's wife, preventing parents from giving the proper amount of individual attention that children need, and so forth. Large families are seen as draining resources and constantly requiring the help of others.

Instead of being the norm like they once were, large families (say more than six or eight children) are now an anomaly. 12 or 15 passenger vans are a rarity. Most families in our church drive SUVs. Even among the Amish, Swartzentrubers being a possible exception, the use of birth control is evident enough.

[Ken]

I doubt it has much at all to do with a "modern world view"

It is simple economics. In a rural agrarian society, additional children are an economic benefit because they provide endless free labor on the farm. Whether we are talking about 19th century America, rural China in the 1980s, or Niger today.

Every country that moves from an agrarian society to an urbanized industrial society goes through the exact same demographic shift regardless of values or world view.

It is a bogus worldview that condenses people down to rational economic actors. It is rather obvious that most people are not actually fungible economic units.

An obvious example would be why Swartzentrubers choose to keep their current culture instead of doing what is more "economic" (although I would argue that, in the long term, they are more economically rational as they seem to be able to acquire and hold on to large amounts of land in contexts where other people are unable to hold on to land or acquire and hold on to affordable housing).

In a non-agrarian industrial economy every additional child is an economic cost.

This would seem to mean that industrial economies are a dead end and will eventually make themselves go extinct. I mean, a culture that considers children a "cost" or an economy that does will eventually price having children out of existence. We can already see this in an advanced stage in Korea and Japan.

Economics most certainly governs human behavior on a macro scale. To cite just one random example, look at Paris. The city is absolutely full of mansard roofs to the point that they are absolutely iconic and instantly recognizable as Parisian. Why is that? Simple, in the 19th century homes and buildings in Paris were taxed by the number of floors not counting the roof. So all the builders started adding an untaxed top floor into the roof and the mansard roof was born. The iconic architecture of Paris was born of tax evasion



Every single society on earth that has transitioned from an agrarian society to an industrial society has seen family size shrink dramatically. And the reason is economics. Children are an advantage if you are farming. They are a disadvantage if you are working outside the home in industry. And the Amish will be no different if/when they transition from an agrarian life to anything urban/suburban with fathers working outside the home rather than farming.

And if the Swartzentruber never transition away from a purely agrarian life they will quickly hit a carrying capacity because there is only so much available land capable of supporting that sort of lifestyle. Just like every other agrarian society in history has done the same from Ireland to Guatemala. Farmland has an actual productive carrying capacity. Especially if you insist on using 19th century techniques.

[MaxPC]

"Me first" is the mantra of mainstream culture.

What do you think are the chances that mainstream society gives up selfishness in terms of having children anytime soon, even if it could be convinced that doing so is in its own ultimate best interest?

I believe the key would be to encourage young Christian families to trust God regarding the children and their numbers.

[mike]

"Me first" is the mantra of mainstream culture.

What do you think are the chances that mainstream society gives up selfishness in terms of having children anytime soon, even if it could be convinced that doing so is in its own ultimate best interest?

I believe the key would be to encourage young Christian families to trust God regarding the children and their numbers.

Yes. After all, if Christians don't have a vibrant culture of life and family, I don't know why we would expect mainstream society to have it.