You Can’t Separate Fertility Choices From Economics
8 min read
When the U.S. fertility rate began falling, toward the end of the 2000s, it at first seemed a predictable response to the hardships of the Great Recession. But as the economy has recovered, fertility has only continued dropping, reaching yet another historic low last year—and raising doubts among some commentators about whether financial concerns are the true cause. Multiple books by such doubters have recently argued, each in its own way, that the primary factors holding people back from parenthood are not economic but cultural. They have cited America’s excessively individualistic and intensive approach to parenting, or the lack of a shared faith that children are a blessing, or a growing ambivalence about whether bringing life into the world is truly a worthy pursuit. Academics, bloggers, and pop pronatalists have meanwhile pointed to a shift in priorities among young people, the low status of motherhood, and the excesses of modern childhood as likely culprits.
Many proponents of these culture-based views draw on a variety of at least outwardly puzzling economic facts to bolster their case. For instance, fertility tends to fall as countries get richer, which is not what you’d expect if people’s ability to afford children is the issue. Policies aimed at boosting the birth rate with financial incentives have had fairly modest impacts where they’ve been tried. And fertility has been falling even in countries such as Finland and Sweden, where parents receive broad state support. All of this, the argument goes, suggests that whatever is driving down fertility probably doesn’t have much to do with money. As Christine Emba wrote recently in The Atlantic, “No amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children—not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.” Or as Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote for Reason, it’s not child care or paid parental leave that American parents need, but a “vibe shift.”
I have no problem believing that culture plays a role in young people’s growing hesitation to have kids. In fact, I’ve made a version of this argument myself. And ample evidence indicates that cultural beliefs, values, and norms play an enormous role in household decision making in general, and fertility decisions in particular, Matthias Doepke, a London School of Economics professor, told me. But it would be a mistake to assume that a society’s culture and economy are quite so unrelated. Culture doesn’t just “fall out of the sky,” Doepke told me. To some extent, culture reflects the material reality in which it operates, and evolves in conjunction with it. This means that anyone who would like to see a shift in cultural attitudes toward child-rearing cannot ignore the economic barriers to such a transformation.
Contrary to arguments purporting otherwise, the notion that falling fertility has little to do with economics is hardly a settled matter. Many of those who assert as much overlook the extent to which the economics of child-rearing have changed in a relatively short time span. For most of human history, as Doepke told me, having children was not a luxury but a necessity. People didn’t have kids despite material deprivation but as a means of avoiding it.
Things are of course very different today, for well-documented reasons. With the emergence of labor markets and the decline of agriculture, the outlawing of child labor and the institution of mandatory education, as well as the creation of public pensions and Medicare, many adults no longer have to (or can) rely as much on their own kids to survive. Instead, as Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic years ago, we depend on other people’s kids, in ways so diffuse that it is easy to forget that we will, at some point, be dependent on anyone at all. Meanwhile, the costs of child-rearing are still largely borne by individual parents. This has created a strange situation in which, as the economist Nancy Folbre wrote in a 1994 paper, everyone relies in numerous ways on the generations of children that come after us, but raising children yourself doesn’t end up making a ton of economic sense. This reality is not unique to the United States: Swedes and Finns, too, have powerful financial incentives to minimize the number of children they have.
The relationship between culture and economics is not a settled matter either. In reality, the boundary between the two is blurrier than many people imagine. “Even the variables that we consider purely economic, like the level of technology, productivity, and so on, have very strong cultural aspects,” Enrico Spolaore, a Tufts University economics professor, told me. Although the researchers I spoke with had subtly different perspectives on how the economy shapes culture, they all agreed that it inevitably does. And plenty of research backs them up. A study published in 2020, for example, found that regions of the world where people have historically relied on rice farming—which requires extensive cooperation among farmers to manage water use—tend to have more rigid social norms than regions where people have farmed wheat, which requires less neighborly collaboration. In a similar vein, agricultural societies that relied on plows, which favored male upper-body strength and led to a gendering of farmwork, have less egalitarian attitudes toward gender roles today. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people, which produced a dearth of men in West Africa, helps explain the comparatively high prevalence of polygyny there now.
In other words, if you’re looking for the source of some cultural ailment or oddity, it’s worth examining the economy underpinning it. Indeed, Doepke’s research suggests that one of the driving forces behind the United States’ intensive parenting culture is the country’s extreme economic inequality, which leads some parents to worry about potentially dire consequences should their children fall behind.
This feedback loop between culture and economics can be tricky to observe because it does not occur in real time. As the studies above suggest, cultural norms can linger long after the economic incentives that bolstered them have fallen away. It takes years, decades, even centuries for norms to erode under economic pressure. And many values can take a while to catch up to new material realities. Attitudes toward working mothers, for example, have changed drastically over time as more women have entered the workforce, but “with a lag,” Doepke told me. It’s entirely possible that the sidelining of child-rearing in young people’s priorities we are witnessing today is an adaptation to economic shifts from previous eras. That is precisely what Folbre suggested might happen in her paper from 30 years ago. “In the long run,” she warned, “failure to remunerate commitments to parental labor may weaken the values, norms, and preferences that supply it”—that is, you can free ride on parents’ labor for only so long before people start to question the idea that having kids is important or fulfilling.
None of this is to say that culture is wholly a by-product of the underlying economy—only that each inevitably shapes and constrains the other. As it happens, a pair of recent papers help shed light on how this interplay between cultural norms and economic incentives pushed fertility lower in the past.
Technically, the present baby bust in America and elsewhere did not begin with the Great Recession but resumed. The now-global trend toward low fertility has been under way for some time, beginning with France in the late 18th century. Demographers consider France’s fertility decline a bit mysterious, because it happened several decades before declines in any other country and despite the fact that France was still relatively poor at the time. Cultural factors played an enormous role in this process. Before the late 18th century, any attempt to limit the number of children one had in marriage was strictly prohibited by the Catholic Church and socially disapproved of. “You would be shunned by your village, your town, your family,” Spolaore, a co-author of one of the papers, told me. But in 1760 or so, France’s turn toward secularization lifted this taboo, and fertility started to fall. In other European countries, fertility rates dropped first in regions culturally similar to France, such as the French-speaking part of Belgium, underscoring how new ideas about fertility control flowed through social channels.
Although these findings emphasize the cultural roots of fertility decline, they also demonstrate how material conditions work to enable or constrain such cultural innovation.
Within France, secularization decreased fertility only “in regions with high population density—that is, where economic incentives to lower fertility and increase education were already in place,” Guillaume Blanc, a University of Manchester economics professor and the author of one of the studies, told me. And in French-speaking regions outside France, the ideas necessary to bring about fertility decline could not have taken hold absent certain economic preconditions, Spolaore told me. Rural agricultural areas—where having many children remained an economic boon to a couple, and child-rearing came with few financial trade-offs—saw no such cultural transformation. That makes sense: Few in these areas were sitting around looking for reasons to justify having smaller families. “The intrinsic incentives to have fewer kids have to be there,” Spolaore told me.
If the goal is to increase fertility, neither cultural nor economic solutions are likely to work in isolation, Spolaore told me, comparing them to two blades in a pair of scissors. “You need two parts of the scissor to cut something,” he said—they work in concert. If he’s right, and if the goal is to reverse the birth rate’s downward spiral, it would be a mistake to dismiss family policies aimed at making child-rearing more affordable. As long as the United States’ threadbare safety net gives people so far to fall, it may not be possible to temper the country’s intensive-parenting culture. As long as raising children comes at such tremendous personal expense, parents and partners may hesitate to reassure their loved ones that it’s a worthy undertaking. And attempts to convince people of the tremendous value of parenthood may ring hollow if they aren’t paired with material support. It is far, far easier to enact cultural change with the economic winds at your back.
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