The question of whether or not to have children has never seemed so political. Sensing a fertility crisis on the horizon, the populist Right are embracing pro-natalism. Elon Musk, father of 11, warns of the mass extinction of entire nations, while over in Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán calls for “procreation not immigration”, a sentiment echoed by Giorgia Meloni.
Beyond the fog of great replacement hysteria, however, there lies a potentially concerning reality. On every continent, birth rates are tumbling. There may well come a day when young people will be unable to maintain public services for an ageing population. In a worst case scenario, that could mean no healthcare, no pensions, and no social care.
Countless explanations have been floated to explain why we have stopped reproducing: raising children is too expensive; childcare is incompatible with women working; motherhood is no longer culturally valued; women have contraception; people no longer get married. There is truth in all of this, but there are several glaring omissions. For one, the birth rate began to fall long before the dawn of contraception, and indeed falls in countries where women do not work. Then there’s the paradox that, in many high-income countries, it is often the richest and best educated who have the fewest children, muddying the story of the rising cost of childcare. This also reverses one of the most robust trends in the animal kingdom: that those of higher status have more offspring.
Part of the problem is that too much emphasis is placed on the period of cultural upheaval that followed the Baby Boom. In the decades between 1950 and 2024, the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children a woman is expected to have — fell from 2.2 to 1.6 in the UK and from 3.0 to 1.6 in France. South Korea’s decline is particularly dramatic, falling from 6.1 to 0.7 in the same period. It now has the lowest TFR in the world.
But this is part of an almost 200-year-old trend. Many of the most dramatic drops in fertility took place long before the Sixties. In Britain, the TFR fell from 4.6 to just over two between 1850 and 1920. In France, it fell from 4.5 to 3.5 between 1760 and 1800. This can’t be explained by the Pill, female liberation, or the rising cost of living.
Perhaps it can be explained, instead, by evolutionary theory, which tends to think about reproductive decision-making as a trade-off between quantity and quality. The idea is that there is an inherent conflict between the number of children one can have and the investment that can go into each child. Parents invest in a child up until the point of diminishing returns, whereupon they switch to raising an additional one.
What we’re seeing now is arguably a mismatch between the environment in which humans evolved, and the one we find ourselves in today. One possibility is that natural selection evolved a human psychology geared towards maximising status. This would have once led to leaving behind the largest number of surviving descendants — the currency of evolution. These days, however, the link between your status and the size of your brood has been broken. Now, chasing status and wealth comes at the expense of having children.
For most of our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers, there was only one main constraint on the number of children a woman could have, and that was whether she had enough energy to conceive, gestate, and breastfeed a child. The quality-quantity tradeoff in such a harsh environment could be brutal. If a woman was unlucky enough to have twins who both required breastfeeding, one would often die in early infancy, either from unintentional neglect or purposeful murder.
Everything changed with the emergence of agricultural livestock and farmland around 12,000 years ago, which marked the beginning of the end of the hunter gatherer lifestyle. As food became more abundant, couples not only began to have more children, they also started to invest in their futures in a way that was impossible before — through wealth inheritance. From then on, the success of a child depended on how much inheritance they received. With this wealth, sons could support more than one wife, or daughters could marry up and climb the social ladder — both of which would have left a greater number of descendants in future generations.
Yet if dividing inheritance equally between multiple children left none of them rich, then parents had a problem. One means of getting around this issue would have been to have fewer children. Instead, parents chose to portion inheritance unequally between their heirs. Primogeniture, for example, where only the eldest son inherits the family wealth, ensures that the rank of the family and productivity of the land is upheld. Similarly, in polygynous societies with cattle wealth, parents often favour older sons, giving them a larger herd. While younger sons are not completely disinherited they tend to marry later and have fewer children. These types of decisions might be favoured above fertility reduction because of the continued uncertainty in survival. An heirs and spares approach.
How can all this explain the falling birth rates we see today? France, which abolished the right of parents to select a single heir in 1793, can perhaps provide a clue as to the origins of contemporary fertility decline. This legal change, which ensured all French children, including daughters, had a right to inherit equally, threatened to bring ruin to many families by splitting farms into countless unprofitable landholdings. French couples responded by having fewer children.
The Industrial Revolution would play its part too, leading to fertility decline in almost every single country on earth — starting with Britain. It would create conditions in which the success of children became almost completely reliant on parental investment — except in this case the investment would become exponential. In a highly competitive market economy, parents spend vast sums on equipping their children for the rat race. No child can be overly prepared.
This creates a mismatch between the psychological drive for status and wealth and the present environment. Once, status would have correlated strongly with the number of children we had, now it pushes us to delay the age at which we get married and have children. Runaway competition means we don’t experience a sense of diminishing returns on our investment in them, leading us to invest more in the ones we have instead of having another. In other words, our psychology tells us that each child requires ever increasing amounts of investment in order to “survive” in today’s society, when in fact the adaptive strategy would be to have five healthy but slightly less wealthy children, instead of two super-elite ones. So, while people are correct when they say that children have become more expensive, perhaps the more important thing is that they feel so much more expensive than they really are.
This can also explain why wealthier couples have fewer children, since the opportunity cost of having an additional child is far greater for those in high-powered jobs compared to those in lower-paid ones. If our psychology encourages us to pursue wealth and status, rather than simply children, then it appears to be working as designed. One study of Swedish people born between 1915 and 1929 found that those who limited their fertility the most, maximised the wealth of their descendants four generations on — and this effect was strongest for already high-wealth individuals.
The dawn of the market economy accelerated the fertility decline in other ways too. For a start, it broke down the extended family networks that were once a fundamental characteristic of human life. These broad networks of kin and helpers at the nest are one of the reasons that humans can raise multiple dependent children at one time — unlike other primates, who rarely have a second child before the first can fend for itself.
Childcare is also incompatible with modern forms of work. We often talk about the past as if women did not work, when of course they did. In many hunter-gatherer and early farming societies, women did a lot of gathering, food processing and cooking, all work that could be done with a baby strapped to one’s back or with a watchful eye on a toddler — unlike today’s workplaces.
How, then, could we go about boosting fertility rates? One thing is certain: Silicon Valley pro-natalists who shout about economic downturn and impending social collapse are unlikely to inspire anyone to have more children. Who ever had a kid to increase GDP or prop up the NHS? Where is the joy in that? If anything, people are less likely to have children if they feel the world is falling apart.
Family-friendly policies, such as more generous parental leave or childcare support, do slow falling fertility rates — but they rarely reverse them. If we are indeed slaves to a psychology that strives for status and over-invests in children, then this makes sense. As long as we see our capitalist environment as particularly competitive, we will continue to have small families. Perhaps only a major societal change, or a huge amount of public money, could change that. In the end, though, perhaps the most bewildering thing of all is that natural selection could not fashion a psychology that achieves the one thing it is meant to do: procreate.
Disclaimer
Some of the posts we share are controversial and we do not necessarily agree with them in the whole extend. Sometimes we agree with the content or part of it but we do not agree with the narration or language. Nevertheless we find them somehow interesting, valuable and/or informative or we share them, because we strongly believe in freedom of speech, free press and journalism. We strongly encourage you to have a critical approach to all the content, do your own research and analysis to build your own opinion.
We would be glad to have your feedback.
Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/