What’s driving the rich world’s falling fertility?

According to analysis by the UK's Office for National Statistics, degree-educated women are nearly twice as likely to remain childless as women without degrees. Photo / Charles Deluvio, Unsplash

OPINION:

Some say the world will end in fire. Others in ice. But from looking at demographic trends in the developed world, I hold with those who favour stairlifts. Or, as Tesla chief Elon Musk puts it, “civilisation will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers”.

Richer states have ageing populations and lower birth rates. That isn’t all bad news: older societies tend to have lower levels of violence and political instability than younger ones. But they also have lower economic growth rates, and are not always good global citizens. The UK, for example, produces fewer doctors than it needs per head of population. Skilled professions like medicine will always be geographically mobile, but when meeting your own healthcare needs are predicated on poaching staff from poorer nations, it’s hard to claim you are a responsible or compassionate nation.

More importantly, we should be preoccupied by the cause of the rich world’s falling fertility rates because we should assume it represents the future of our planet if, as we hope, the whole world continues to become wealthier, healthier and better educated.

Some of the causes of falling fertility are obviously benign. In much of the rich world, the number of pregnancies carried to term in early adolescence is now so low as to be statistically insignificant. Globally, the proportion of young women who give birth before 18 is just 15 per cent. Given that maternal conditions are among the top five killers of girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide, this is an unalloyed positive, and it springs from greater reproductive freedom and easier access to contraception.

But in the rich world, not all causes of falling fertility rates are as positive. In the UK, the introduction in 2017 of the two-child limit for child benefit claims was, according to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, “important” in the decision-making of women. That has led many British left-wingers to argue that the country’s falling fertility rates are a result of its socio-economic divides. Small wonder fewer people are choosing to have children if they can’t afford homes and face heavy childcare costs.

That makes intuitive sense, but some data suggest the fall in fertility in the rich world has proved resistant to greater spending on family incentives and other welfarist measures. In the UK, what is driving the fall in the birth rate is actually growing childlessness among the middle and upper classes. It’s true that household formation has slowed in Britain, but it is far from clear that this is primarily driven by poverty or inequality.

According to analysis by the Office for National Statistics, degree-educated women are nearly twice as likely to remain childless as women without degrees. Given that women are the biggest driver of increased higher education participation worldwide, that suggests a very sharp increase in the number of childless households in the future.

The real cause, I think, is not iniquity in the housing market or in the cost of childcare, but in the workplace. With a few happy exceptions, maternity is a terrible deal, economically speaking, for working women. Although there is a regrettable paucity of high-quality studies on this, I suspect the pattern we see in the UK data would be even starker if we separated the reproductive choices of women who are the family’s second earner from those who are the first.

The rise of so-called “greedy jobs” — where your progress is closely linked to how much of your personal life you are willing to put on hold — is a further disincentive to have children. But some policymakers deny this is a problem: one minister recently told me they weren’t that worried about the remaining gender pay gap, because it was “just” a motherhood penalty.

Of course, most people who have children will, not unreasonably, tell you that maternity is a great deal. In general, loss aversion is a powerful force in our decision-making. Someone who has a career they enjoy and who lacks a supportive employer will be reluctant to take it on trust that their hypothetical child will make up for the loss of income and prestige at work. The writer Richard Reeves has likened the economic impact of childbirth on the average woman to a “meteorite”. It is hardly surprising if women seek to avoid the collision.

In the rich world, for now, this is a problem that policymakers can “solve” through immigration. But as wealth, education and prosperity spread, the only way to prevent global fertility rates from plummeting and to avoid the world ending in adult diapers is to make childbirth a better deal for professional women. We should start now.

- Stephen Bush is an associate editor and columnist at the Financial Times

Written by: Stephen Bush

© Financial Times