Bad economics as population control

There was an interesting cover story over the weekend by Russell Shorto in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on the rapidly falling population in Europe. In a nutshell, the birthrate across Europe has dropped throughout the continent to well below what is considered to be the "replacement rate" of 2.1 children per woman. In southern and eastern Europe, the birth rate is 1.3 children per woman.

Demographers describe the new phenomenon as "lowest low" fertility rates. If the trend continues, Shorto suggests, Europe by midcentury will be a shadow of its former self, and the continent will have to confront a variety of daunting—and for some, disturbing—social and cultural changes. In a way, P. D. James's novel Children of Men, which was recently turned into a film starring Clive Owen, reflects the sense of apocalyptic crisis that is dawning upon the continent.

Depending on who you ask, any number factors are causing the decline. P. D. James's novel, unlike the film, draws deeply on Christian imagery to suggest that the falling birthrate is, at root, a spiritual problem. Indeed, as Shorto notes, many of Europe's Christians seem to agree:

After arguing for decades that the West had divorced itself from God and church and embraced a self-interested and ultimately self-destructive lifestyle, abetted above all by modern birth control, they feel statistically vindicated. “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future,” Pope Benedict proclaimed in 2006. “Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.”

Certainly, a sense of European spiritual malaise—a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of "why bother?"—could be at work here.

But what is interesting about Shorto's piece is that he suggests that there are other factors in play. While many women in Germany and Austria are indeed preferring to remain childless, many European women actually want to have more children than they currently have. "Women were asked how many children they would like to have," Shorto says, "the average result was 2.36—well above the replacement level and far above the rate anywhere in Europe. If women are having significantly fewer children than they want, there must be other forces at work."

What are these forces? Demographers are noticing is that childrearing is not only a spiritual question but is also an economic one. That is, the conditions of life are such that they are not permitting women to have the children that they want to have. The costs—not only the direct financial costs of raising a child but also the opportunity costs of staying out of the workforce and the relational costs that children bring to bear on the family—are prohibitively high.

Shorto notes that Scandanavia and the United States do not share in Europe's decline in birthrate, but for different reasons. Scandanavian countries have an extraordinary broad network of social welfare that eases the costs of childrearing. The United States, while far less extensive in its welfare system, is far more socially and relationally flexible.

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. [Arnstein] Aassve [a Norwegian demographer] put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

Shorto's article is important because it reminds us that societies need to find ways to permit women to have and welcome children, and that this effort is only partially a spiritual one.