Three Basic Facts that Affect Fertility
And often get overlooked by men worried about birth rates.
Worries over falling birth rates have replaced fears of the “population bomb.” Birth rates have noticeably cratered in Italy and South Korea but are declining throughout the developed world. Lately, it seems, the subject has been the topic of columns and blog posts by everybody and his brother. Here’s
, here’s Ross Douthat, here’s , and here’s a long list of posts from . has written two characteristically deep posts (here and here) in the context of his thoughts on “the permanent problem,” as well as an earlier one on the “global fertility collapse.” I could go on, but you get the idea.
These are all smart guys with good intentions. But they are also…all guys. They tend to downplay some crucial facts about the world in which women make child-bearing decisions. Men know these facts intellectually—they’ve heard the term “biological clock”—but too often don’t put two and two together.
Women over 35 cannot easily and safely have babies.
People build crucial human capital—including formal education, on-the-job skills, and professional networks and reputation—before the age of 35 and certainly before the age of 40. Men can devote these years to their careers and still easily and safely have children. Women cannot. They can only do so with the help of assisted reproductive technology, which is expensive, can be medically risky, and may not work.
Some careers are “greedy,” to use economist Claudia Goldin’s term. Greedy jobs are distinct from jobs that require child care during predictable work hours. They demand long hours, on-call work schedules, or frequent travel. They do not easily accommodate the demands of family life, which has its own greedy demands. Greedy jobs are often the highest paid or most prestigious in a particular field, industry, or society. For couples raising children, it’s generally the case that only one partner can successfully pursue a greedy job. The other will either take time out of work altogether when children are young or pursue a less greedy career. If both partners wish to pursue greedy jobs, they will likely not have children.1 If a woman is pursuing a greedy job and her husband a regular one, kids are also less likely.
It’s also worth noting that, among developed countries, low birth rates are highly correlated with traditional attitudes toward motherhood and family life. The single best predictor of low birth rates in Europe is the belief that pre-school children are harmed if their mother works. It’s much more important than the price of childcare. See this deep dive by
.To get back to the Three Basic Facts, leave aside the fraught question of finding a partner and suppose an ambitious young woman meets and marries her ideal mate by her mid-20s.2 Biologically she can easily have a several children. But to do so she must forgo developing vital human capital until she is in her 40s. Her male peers, meanwhile, will be building theirs. At 40, she will be the resume equivalent of, say, a 28-year-old man—but her education and skills will likely be, or be perceived as, out-of-date.
The traditional careers pursued by the mothers of the baby boom, such as teaching and nursing, are ideal for late reentry. (See my interview with Goldin.) Many others are not, including some, such as p.r., that may not even be especially greedy. The state-of-the-art moves on and, despite the law, employers often discriminate against people over 40, especially in entry-level positions. Robert De Niro vehicles notwithstanding, good luck finding an internship when you’ve been out of school for decades.
Pro-natalist policies that do not address the Three Basic Facts will be, at best, only marginally successful. Every time I read yet another article by yet another man who is ignoring these facts it makes me wonder what he was doing in his 30s.
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This includes single-sex couples like my sisters-in-law. It’s a matter of the division of labor, not gender roles.
On greedy careers, I always think of (a different!) sister-in-law, whose medical school professors encouraged her toward surgery. She said she’d like to talk to a successful woman surgeon who had a happy marriage and children. They said, “We think there’s one in Texas.” She became an anesthesiologist. (My brother, her husband, is a primary care physician.)
In case you’re wondering, I have seven sisters-in-law. I have three brothers and my husband has three sisters, one of whom has a wife.
There's the greedy job problem at the top, but there's also the greedy job problem at the bottom. An awful lot of jobs offer irregular, unpredictable hours, variable pay, compulsory overtime and pay low enough to require one to work more than one job to stay off the streets. A lot more people work that kind of job than are high powered career oriented folks. These are the people who might want to have children, but know that taking a day off when a child is sick may mean losing one's job, one's car, one's apartment and so on in a terrible, well documented spiral. If we want more children, the low end greedy job problem seems easier to fix and would benefit more people.
There's something misogynist about this focus on pushing women in high powered careers to have children. Where's the pressure for male executives on the C-suite track to take off a decade or two and raise their wife's children? If she's on a high powered track, odds are she can take a month or so off, and then, after delivery, let daddy take over. Even a highly competitive career can recover from a brief hiatus, but not one lasting decades. Where's the pressure on male doctors? Male professors? Maybe men need different career incentives, or we need to change the tax code to encourage men to raise their children.
I've yet to see a convincing argument that falling fertility is a problem. The dumbest one going around argues that more people would provide us with more creative brainpower to solve the world's problems. Are we really twice as creative as we were in 1974 with four billion than we are today with eight billion? How many of the pressing problems of 1974 has our much larger population let us to solve by sheer dint of additional warm bodies? We've been there, done that. We can survive it again, even if it means wearing lime green leisure suits. Besides, if the population drops by 50%, that means capital investment per capita has doubled. There's no clear argument as to why a higher level of capital investment per person would be a bad thing.
The real argument seems to be about women succeeding outside their traditional roles, not population, not creativity, not capital formation.
Knowing lots of women (and couples) who delayed (and had fewer) kids for exactly these reasons, I think the only thing that is going to reverse the decline in fertility among couples with members who are in those "greedy" jobs is 1) restoring the kind of support networks that existed in the past - with lots of people who aren't-the-mom providing childcare/household tasks.
And on the demand side: 2) reducing the societal perception that kids are a massive burden and extremely susceptible to damage from lack of relentless parenting/protection and 3) a change IN the way those "greedy" jobs work to allow having kids (or other "luxuries").
From personal experience, someone having kids in med school or residency was considered "insane" and the med schools/residency programs had no interest whatsoever in making it more possible. They considered a two-day weekend "a golden weekend." Believe whatever you want about inheritance or nature vs. nurture or SES data, I think we can agree that doctors having kids is a good thing - at the very least the pediatric rotation they do should provide some good information! But we have a medical training system (and a society that demands parenting time-commitments that are incompatible with it) that makes it almost impossible to do so.
I am not sure this is the right way to actually address it for this case, but you often see data showing "there is only 25% women in this job" with the implication that without some kind of discrimination, it would be closer to 50%. What would it look like if we did "only 5% of people in medical training had kids, while the % for everyone else over the same time period is 70%" and treated that like a problem (by the people running medical training, not by just imposing yet another societal demand on those docs) that had to be fixed?