The culture and economics of fertility cannot be separated

Fixing our birth rates will inevitably involve tackling both

There is a big debate in the ‘pronatalist’ world around whether ‘culture’ or ‘economics’ is more important in driving births. This is the wrong debate. Any effective economic intervention a society makes will change culture as well. 

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Since the 1800s, birth rates have fallen across the developed world. They temporarily rose in many developed countries before, during, and after the second world war, but have since declined further, and this time they have stayed low. The rest of the world has followed.

Childcare costs are very high in some countries. Housing costs, making extra bedrooms for children expensive, are high in many. And, increasingly, the Western countries with the highest fertility rates are those with high female labour force participation rates, like Sweden: countries that tend to have egalitarian gender norms and generous maternity leave policies. More socially conservative developed countries, like Italy, South Korea, Japan, Greece, and Taiwan tend to have the lowest birth rates. Richer people now have more children. 

All of these facts together have led some to argue an ‘economic’ story behind fertility rates.

Total fertility rates predict the number of children the average woman currently of childbearing age will have by the time she reaches the end of her fertile years. The gaps between national fertility rates in 1980 and 2000 are pretty small, and have narrowed since. Spain’s 2023 total fertility rate was 1.19. Sweden’s was 1.49, as was the UK’s. France managed 1.68. These differences matter quite a bit – France is having 80,000 more births than the UK each year – but they are not dramatic.

The gap between Swedish and Spanish fertility, 0.3 births per women, is dwarfed by the gap between native and non-EU-born residents of Belgium (0.8), or Germans and non-EU-born citizens of Germany (just under 0.6). And these are dwarfed in turn by the fertility rate gaps between either of these groups and ultra-high-fertility groups like Hasidic Jews, who often have six or seven surviving children, or the Old Order Amish, who have about five. 

These larger gaps have led people to argue that it clearly must be ‘culture’ that is most important.

Culture responds to economic incentives.

Culture can also be called ‘folkways’: the way that your group does things. The idea is that you follow a script which lays out the established fertility patterns of what your group does, rather than doing a complicated economic calculation and working out whether you value the time playing with your children, their visits in old age, and so on, as balanced against the costs of extra space, the reduced freedom, the time spent on drudgery, and the inconvenience. 

‘Let’s have two children and raise them well’. South Korean poster.

Clearly some version of this story is true. The most important human trait is copying and mimicking. Doing complex economic calculations around every one of your decisions is very difficult. 

But culture changes, implying that it isn’t just about mindlessly following what the last generation did. My view is that family-level culture is mostly about copying the perceived behaviors of those who are successful, because working out all the exact answers is too difficult for every individual. This is a bit like how names tend to start off in more economically successful ‘classes’ or families, before making their way down the social hierarchy.

My view helps explain how fertility transitions work. French fertility declined much earlier than the rest of the world. It appears to have been linked to a ‘culture’ of rising secularism: areas seeing the decline also saw wills use less religious language, and fewer testators (those giving wills) donating money to Catholic churches so that priests would remember them in masses for as long as the church existed.

But this cultural shift could also be seen as copying a cultural invention that ‘worked’.

Aristocratic fertility had declined even earlier in France. More generally, fertility fell first among the richer classes in all European fertility transitions.

We could see this as the most successful people first in society discovering a norm that worked (investing more in fewer children) and later the others copying them. So we might well say this transition was mostly about ‘economics’ – which patterns are most successful within society – and culture is just a description of different folkways people adopted as they proved to generate successful children.

This happens to immigrants to modern Western countries too. They come from vastly different cultures and usually follow a different ‘script’ in the first generation – with different languages, accents, clothes, sexual and relationship standards – and of course fertility rates, as I pointed out a few paragraphs up. But they usually converge to native fertility within one generation, presumably because they adopt the native culture (aka ‘learn what the accepted script of respected behavior is’).

Cultural and economic interventions are hard to disentangle. Realistic ‘cultural’ interventions look economic.

Take drink driving. The first step to tackling it was implementing weak, slap-on-the-wrist penalties for those caught driving under the influence to indicate that the behaviour was abnormal, and that society disapproved of it.

Paragons of the community – hardcore norm followers – rapidly began following the new norm, now common knowledge had been established. This removed the stigma against punishing drink driving, which had been ‘normal’ behaviour. This meant penalties could be steadily ratcheted upwards, until only a tiny minority of people who don’t care what society thinks of them were drinking and driving. Fines and incentives changed culture.

If we wanted to encourage fertility in the same way it would be totally inappropriate, probably impossible, and borderline fascist and evil to start fining or punishing people for not having children. But there are some antisocial behaviours that we might want to softly discourage, though not with criminal penalties.

‘Two children is already too much!’ South Korean poster.

Lots of expectations, perpetuated through behaviours, raise the cost of having children by socially pressuring people to spend more money or drudgery on them. We could discourage these.

We might wish to tax mostly positional goods, like private tutors, expensive weddings, or luxury children’s shoes. We could discourage the social norm of putting in enormous effort to make children costumes for special days at school, of giving children separate bedrooms before they are teenaged, and of buying them new clothes and toys rather than giving them hand-me-downs.

On the positive side we could encourage (and subsidise) things that lower the cost of kids, like alloparenting – parenting by those other than the parents themselves. We could make degrees and career paths more flexible. The more high status people who access these schemes the more such schemes are likely to be viewed in a positive light. Society tends to respect and admire those things which go along with economic success.

Shifting the behaviours of those who are most responsive to social cues could cause rapid cascading effects and make certain costly showing-off behaviours feel ‘cringe’. Paradigm economic interventions have cultural effects.

These kinds of interventions have worked before.

Economic factors – albeit undirected ones – are also the main reason for past increases in fertility rates, as documented in work by the amazing new group Boom. The Baby Boom came about when it became more affordable to get married and start a family, plus giving birth became less risky to the mother’s health, and new technologies made it easier to raise the children you did have.

But deliberate economic changes have worked too. South Tyrol, a region in the German-culture part of Italy, had a birth rate that was about average for Italy, and well below German-speaking countries before 1990. From that point they began making a few small, but consistently administered, changes that mixed helping shoulder the cost of children with showing that the state (and by extension, society as a whole) respected parents and mothers. By 2020 it was seeing vastly more births than anywhere else in Italy, and even beating the German-speaking world. 

The province defying Italy’s birth dearth

France has bucked decades of fertility declines and also has a raft of policies that help people have children: lots of housebuilding, tax rates that are much more generous for parents than for childless couples and singletons, and much more.

According to the French national demographic institute, their healthy birth rate largely comes from high native fertility, rather than being driven up by immigrants. Also, French fertility doesn’t appear to correlate especially well geographically with current migration flows. Lyman Stone has also shown that those with three or four French grandparents are having practically the same number of children as those with zero.

But France doesn’t collect statistics on French people by ethnicity or religion, so it’s not possible to completely rule out the possibility that the children of migrants who follow different religions are partly responsible for French fertility.

Explaining the ‘cause’ of the long-term and recent downward trend in fertility  is instinctively held by many to be important. First we should understand why we’re here, the idea goes, and then we can reverse whatever brought us here. 

I think this perspective is wrong. Every social trend is massively ‘overdetermined’, meaning that there are hundreds of (theoretically adjustable) factors pushing it both up and down.

‘Why has British growth been slow since 2008’ is a complex, abstract, philosophical question. Whereas ‘what could we do to raise growth’ is a simple question, which doesn’t require taking a stance on why growth has been slow. You could raise British growth by relaxing constraints on the supply of housing. But that doesn’t imply that Britain’s growth has been slow over recent decades because of a lack of housing (though I think housing is a part of the story, of course).

The very high fertility populations do achieve their rates through retaining ‘cultural’ elements that we lost. They jettison nearly everything that typical Westerners hold dear: personal space, possessions, gender egalitarianism, rationalist schooling, expressive clothing. In some sense it’s true that our low fertility comes from not living in this way. Most would not consider it desirable to go back.

But there are cultural changes we could make to raise our fertility rate – it’s just that they are also economic interventions too.