Speech by Hilary Salt at the Battle of Ideas, 19th October 2024
With my actuarial hat on, I did think it might be important to start by explaining some of the complexities of measuring fertility so we don’t misinterpret the data – which is very easy to do.
You can measure fertility using a cohort approach – this means waiting until women born in a certain year have reached the end of their childbearing years (that in itself a tricky concept though generally assumed at 45) and say how many children did they on average have. This is reliable but very delayed. Using this approach, we can now assess the fertility of women born in the late 1970s.
Using this approach, we can see that women born in 1977 have a completed family size of 1.94 children compared to their mothers’ generation of 2.07 and a high (at least for generations alive today) of 2.42 for women born in 1933. Much more striking is the difference in the number of children women had before they were 30 – 0.98 for the 1977 cohort and 1.54 for their mothers – so a move to later maternity. Of the 1977 cohort, 16% had no children compared to 14% of their mothers and with more of a contrast 18% had one child compared to 13% of their mothers. Two children families do remain the norm – for 38% of the 1977 cohort and 44% of their mothers.
The alternative is to use a period total fertility rate. This applies the recent rates of live births by age to the current female population split by age to produce a hypothetical average number of children. This approach is much more current and reactive but it can be misleading if the age at which women have children is changing – which it is – with a switch to late child birth. This means applying previous age specific rates to this year’s age structure can give the wrong answer. On this basis, the total fertility rate in 2022 was 1.46 children per woman – a significant fall from 1.94 as recently as 2010. This does seem to point to a significant fall in expected births but do note the earlier caveats about the unreliability of this approach when the age at which women give birth are changing. I am not saying there has not been a change but rather than we do need to wait for more evidence before we can be sure.
The need for care with the statistics has not stopped an almost apocalyptic popular discussion about the collapse in fertility. (Interestingly, a map showing total fertility rates by region does indicate a big difference between the regions of the somewhere and the anywhere twitterati regions). So should we be panicking? My view is that we shouldn’t panic but we should care.
It’s important to note that the relationship between the size and age structure of a population is complex. As David Bloom, the Harvard demographer and economist notes: “it is an overstatement to say that demography determines all, as it downplays the fact that both demographic trajectories and their development implications are responsive to economic incentives; to policy and institutional reforms; and to changes in technology, cultural norms, and behavior.”
That complexity is drowned out in popular discussion by what we might term “demographic thinking” characterized by a tendency to fatalism. We can tell these approaches are a priori thinking because at different times directly opposite claims are made. With a rising population, the doomographers say “more people, limited resources, less for all”. With falling fertility they cry “fewer people, less growth, less for all.” There does seem to be a particularly visceral worry about falling fertility – going back to Walter Bagehot claiming in 1872 that “the most successful races, other things being equal, are those which multiply the fastest”.
In reality, there are far more important drivers to the growth of an economy. Some are participation in the workplace (and we have a real issue here with people unable or unwilling to contribute), the quality of infrastructure and perhaps most importantly levels of business efficiency and productivity – all things we can tackle more easily than fertility rates.
The other reason I think we should push back against the panic about fertility is that it provides a pretext for intervention in ordinary people’s lives and in particular women’s lives. We have seen in the past how policies to address what the West saw as too many births in the underdeveloped world were couch in terms of women’s rights to education and independence. Sometimes this was done quite explicitly. Paul Ehrlich (of The Population Bomb) for example noted:
“Women have traditionally been allowed to fulfil only the roles of wife and mother. Anything that can be done to diminish the emphasis on those roles and provide women with equal opportunities in education, employment and other areas is likely to reduce the birth rate”.
Today we have intervention in the West with the opposite aims. Whilst I’m very happy to see financial help for those choosing to have children, I’m worried about Macron’s health checks, attacks on abortion and what seems like a concerted attempt to normalise surrogacy – the renting out of women’s bodies for reproduction.
For all these reasons, I want to argue against panic. But at the same time, I think we need to recognize that many young people do want to have children but are hampered by inadequate, unaffordable housing, a taxation system that provides no help to parents, exorbitant childcare costs and a general social attitude that the world isn’t fit for their children.
We need to support that generation in forming families by building houses and providing the financial and human support they need to allow them to share the fulfilment parenthood brings and to give them a real investment in the future.
