In the week since the publication of my first article in a series about declining global fertility rates in developed countries around the world, The Times ran at least two more articles on the subject: One asked whether it was possible for China to reverse its population decline. (TL;DR: Probably not.) Another was about what the statistics about declining fertility miss about the stressors of modern parenting.
The article about China mentions some potential societal benefits of having fertility rates (the average number of children born to each woman) below population replacement levels (the average number of births needed to replace the current population), and that’s among the topics I’m exploring today: ways that lower fertility rates can be viewed as a good thing; some underexplored reasons people remain childless when they may not want to be; and what nations with an aging population can do to keep their economies healthy.
One key reason fertility rates dropped and remain low is a global rise in education, according to Vegard Skirbekk, a population economist and the author of the 2022 book “Decline and Prosper! Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children.” (Personally, I think it’s pretty hard to argue that a more educated populace is anything other than good for humanity.)
Education winds up lowering fertility for both men and women for a number of reasons, Skirbekk explains in his book. People who stay in school are more likely to delay starting families; the more educated people are, the more likely they are to use contraception and to see fertility as “a manageable matter of personal choice as opposed to something unpredictable and unavoidable”; and education can raise the opportunity costs of having children, which is another way of saying, “how much income one must forego in order to have children.”
What was new to me was his explanation of how rising education levels for men as well as women affect the fertility rate. I’d previously heard that in high fertility countries, encouraging girls to stay in school helped them delay childbearing and ultimately have smaller and healthier families. When I spoke to Skirbekk last week, he told me that the “male factor” in the fertility decline in developed countries was a “slightly provocative issue” that was underresearched and underdiscussed. The reporting on the baby bust often characterizes it as a problem of women having fewer children, perhaps for no other reason than that women’s fertile years and the number of babies they have can be easier to track.
But, Skirbekk writes: “In several industrialized countries, childlessness is now more common among men than it is among women.” For example, “in the period between 2006 and 2010, one in four men in the United States was childless at age 40, compared to around one in seven women.” In Finland, he writes, the problem is even more acute: “One in three men was childless at age 40 in 2015.”
This isn’t because of a lack of men, of course. And probably not the result of a purported drop in global sperm count, a theory that more recent studies have shown to be overblown. Skirbekk argues, in part, that it’s because of a lack of “‘suitable’ men, as women have become increasingly selective.” (We’re mostly sticking to a discussion of cishet relationships here, because while many L.G.B.T.Q. individuals and partners are parents, populationwide they’re still enough of a minority that they don’t make a big dent in overall fertility rates.)
“Even in the world’s most gender-egalitarian countries, women tend to prefer men with relatively high income and education,” according to Skirbekk. Women also tend to not want to partner with men who have drug and alcohol problems or are prone to violence.
Presenting data from 27 Western countries, Skirbekk writes that in most instances, somewhere below 10 percent, in some cases below 5 percent, of the population seems to voluntarily opt for being childless. On an individual level, that’s not a problem: free country and all. But, I do think what Skirbekk calls coincidental childlessness — when people who never explicitly decided they don’t want children don’t have them for a variety of reasons — is a problem. If someone wants a child but doesn’t end up with one because of not finding a suitable partner, because of reaching age-related infertility, or because of the increasing expense of having children, that can be life altering.
That men are increasingly living lives in which they feel they are unable to fully flourish, causing women to not want to have children with them, is a problem about which commentators like the Brookings fellow Richard Reeves are sounding the alarm. On his Substack, “Of Boys and Men,” Reeves, the author of a recent book of the same name, describes the challenges facing boys and men that he feels have been “dangerously neglected” and says that the closer he looked, “the bleaker the picture became.”
Skirbekk’s prescriptions could help ameliorate some problems young men are experiencing throughout the developed world. “So far, few policies have effectively addressed some of the main barriers to fertility, including the economic position of the young — which has worsened over recent decades in many countries,” he writes. As my colleague David Brooks noted in September, in America, “The biggest drop in employment is among young men aged 25 to 34.”
Policies that strengthen opportunities for younger men in the labor and housing markets might be more important in increasing fertility rates than “a one-time cash incentive,” says Skirbekk. He also believes that governmental help in creating better work-life balance would facilitate more people having children while they’re still able to. Reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization certainly can help people have babies later in life, but they’re costly and don’t work for everyone.
Skirbekk also believes that encouraging fertility is only going to get us so far, and that low-fertility countries need to adapt to their new reality instead. Growing the earth’s population endlessly is at odds with efforts to address climate concerns. Immigration can be part of the solution, but in our country — a nation of immigrants — there’s no political consensus about how to update our immigration system. Hungary, as I noted last week, has rolled out an assortment of governmental incentives to increase fertility, but despite membership in the E.U. and NATO, is relatively insular, with authoritarian, some would say ethnonationalist, leadership — in any case, we shouldn’t take cues from the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Importantly, even if more countries became more open to more immigration, that isn’t necessarily a fix, since the fertility rate of people from higher fertility countries has been found to decline once they immigrate to lower fertility countries. According to a 2020 report from the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, “nearly all countries hosting the largest numbers of international migrants had fertility levels below 2.1 children per woman, that is, below replacement levels.”
While politically unpopular, some countries are going to revisit the idea of raising their retirement ages — but we could choose to see this as an opportunity to rethink the way we’ve structured work.
In the United States in particular, because full-time work is tied to health insurance, there are fewer opportunities for what we’d think of as quality part-time jobs. In our country, we’re generally expected to work full time until retirement — usually for a period of around 45 years. We make it difficult to work part time during periods of caregiving — for younger children and older family members — and we make it harder to have a slow-fade retirement. Breaking down some baked-in assumptions about work would help fix the growing problem of a lack of working-age Americans without relying only on people to have more babies to fill that need.
And speaking of more babies, in the next installment of this series (which will run after I take a brief vacation), I’ll be going through reader responses to my question: Is there any potential government or workplace benefit that would inspire you to increase your family size? Over 1,100 of you wrote in before we closed the reply period, with fascinating and generous responses. Thank you so much for writing!