We are doomed by our wealth and prosperity

I wrote about the Baby Drought some time ago from a global perspective where every continent except Africa is at or rapidly heading for non-replacement birth rates of less than 21 children for every 100 women. Sooner or later that leads to population decline, and it’s not just theory, it has been happening in Japan for two decades now, and it’s exactly what theory predicted for them in the 1970’s. China, South Korea and others are fast following.

This post is more focused on the West because, amidst all the reasons put forward about the cost of having and raising children, plus all the proposed solutions – state funded family leave, child care, health care, and tax credits – the problem may be cultural. The writer, Laura Perrins (who has four kids herself) levers off a recent article in The Times which lays out the problems that will result from a declining population:

‘Many of our challenges in the years ahead will worsen if our birthrate is left to wither. With a rapidly ageing population, we will struggle to care for the elderly. With the desire to reduce immigration, we will be left with job shortages. With a depleted workforce to drive the economy, we will put further strain on the state’s resources. Many other nations with the same problems are not afraid of talking about them, nor should Britain.’ 

Perrins sarcastically responds that “I happen to think that the problem with fewer children is that there are fewer children“:

I have a question for you. Would you rather live in a society with average growth but a healthy number of children, or in a society with lots and lots of growth, wealth, money and stuff and lots of foreign workers, but a dwindling number of children? 
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It is the idea, the belief, that a future with fewer and fewer children will be fine. It is the premise that a society with empty playgrounds, shuttered schools, closed toy shops will be the same as we have now. The truth is that a society where there are more and more single people, more and more childless couples and fewer and fewer children will not be a nice one. 

She points out that this is very important to think about aside from the questions of economic growth and sustainability of State pension funds and healthcare systems, in the later article she goes on to point out the futility of the solutions proposed, because of one cultural thing:

The real reason for the collapsing fertility rate, in free fall in conservative countries such as Japan and Italy and declining in the liberal Northern European countries such as Denmark, is that the role of women has changed fundamentally. There was a revolution in the culture and societal values that feminists pushed and women fell in with.
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The feminists told women that the home was a place of drudgery, where women were chained to the kitchen sink and bored out of their minds either on prescription drugs or outright alcoholics. The home was a place of oppression and the workplace, even though full of discrimination, was a better place to be.

And although an increasing number of Millennial and Gen-Z woman have realised the whole Grrrrrlll- Power, Lady Boss, Super-Mum thing is a stressed out facade the result seems to be that they’ve decided to not have kids at all while continuing to battle away in the workforce. Given the reported rates of depression and pill-taking among Western woman, and the rising levels of female unhappiness, that might not be a solution either.

But aside from this problem with feminist theory – even as the Right got lots of cheaper workers and the Left got Liberated Women – Perrins points out the obvious about the lack of kids:

So just why are people surprised at the collapsing fertility rate? If you trash and reduce the status of something you get less of it. For perhaps four decades the role of motherhood has been kicked and denigrated, so don’t act shocked when women choose not to pursue it.

We haven’t been as inhumane as China in reducing our birth rate, but we’ve been almost as effective.

When it comes to cultural norms the feminists have made no bones about the fact that they saw sex as intimately tied to women’s freedom as it was to relationships, hence their massive efforts to break sex off from marriage, and thus the ties to men. Being sexually free was the first step on the path to Workforce Freedom.

I should add that I have been a big supporter of that theory my whole life, having fun with as many freedom-loving girls as I could and appalled by the idea of getting married in my early 20’s. But as I observe the society around me – and not just in the form of a declining population – I’m beginning to think that the old conservative squares had it right:

Step forward J D Unwin, an ethnologist and social anthropologist at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, who a century ago painstakingly studied 80 primitive tribes and six known civilisations through 5,000 years of history. Unwin described his 600+ page book Sex and Culture as a ‘summary’ of his decades of research; a full disclosure would require seven volumes.

Although his study was published nearly 90 years ago, in 1934, it is still relevant…..Unwin had no axe to grind; he was not a believer and his work reads like that of a scientific rationalist who has nothing positive to say about Christianity.

Unwin’s conclusion is not a comforting one for the modern Western mind:

He concluded that there is a positive correlation between the level of cultural achievement and survivability of a society and the level of sexual restraint expected within that society.
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 ‘Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom; the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation…. The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilised unless it has been absolutely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.’

Well shit! That’s certainly how it feels here in NZ and as I look across the West, and it has been sixty years, roughly two generations, since the Sexual Revolution started. Unwin reckoned it took three generations for the malaise to set in for good so maybe we can turn this around. Certainly the Gen-Z’s have scathing attitudes towards the Boomers across a range of issues, including their Free Love sex lives. But even with Gen-Z the result of a more conservative attitude towards sexual freedom seems to be no sex at all rather than getting hitched and giving birth as soon as possible.

However, it may be that even sexual restraint wouldn’t work for the same reasons that child care subsidies and cheaper housing wouldn’t work; because the cultural change around sex is less driven by things like feminist theory or even wealth but simply by increases in individual freedom that are unstoppable, at least in a free society:

The fertility rate has declined not because of house prices, childcare or anything else so amenable to public policy. It’s happened because of that social glory of this past century, the economic emancipation of women. Fewer dead kids, more things to do in this life, both mean fewer births. And that’s it, that’s the whole and complete of it. We’ll also not change it without reversing that grand and glorious change.

The writer, Tim Worstall, is as dismissive of the proposed solutions as Perrins, although he appears to come at it from a Libertarian and perhaps even Objectivist perspective, which tracks with his breezy dismissal of the resulting problems:

So, we’ve spent this last century finally freeing half the species. Great! The society that results, an ageing population, a falling fertility rate, they’re just things we have to suck up and deal with. For they are the results of that freedom and who the fuck are you to tell people how they should live their lives?

True. But when I go visit my 94-year old friend in his nursing home, I see that almost the entire staff are Filipino women. According to him they all have kids. As Mark Steyn once wrote: “The future belongs to those who show up“.