With the urgent debate on demographic declines in some parts of
the world, a historical reminder of what worked and what didn’t may
be useful. It offers insights into the far broader picture of the
links between people’s private decisions and public policy.
After Germany defeated France in 1870-1, and political leaders
associated military strength with numerical superiority, declining
population and the future of French language and culture became the
focus of French politics. When ratifying the Treaty of Versailles,
George Clemenceau, France’s prime minister in 1919, announced: “The
treaty does not say that France must undertake to have children,
but it is the first thing which ought to have been put in it. For
if France turns her back on large families, one can put all the
clauses one wants in a treaty, one can take all the guns of
Germany, one can do whatever one likes, France will be lost because
there will be no more Frenchmen.” Later, Vichy politicians embraced
“pronatalism of the French population,” and gave gold medals for
women having more than ten children (silver to those with seven,
and bronze to those with five). It did not help — absurd policies
rarely do.
Michel Debre, Prime Minister under de Gaulle, also spoke often
in the National Assembly about “the demographic struggle,” and in
1979, Michel Jobert, who had been de Gaulle’s foreign minister,
wrote an article titled “Comment un pays meurt” (“How a country
dies”) for a collection entitled La France ridee (“Empty
France”). Jacques Chirac described the demographic situation in
France as “terrifying” and Europe as “vanishing.” This must sound
familiar in Canada: in 1978, the Federation of Francophones outside
Quebec published “The Heirs of Lord Durham: Manifesto of a
Vanishing People.”
France’s political leaders, its media, and the “intelligentsia”
showed a near consensus on deploring the trends in fertility and
asking for state intervention. But the political debates did not
convince the French to make more children. Perhaps part of the push
for the European Community coming from France and Germany, which
also faced a low birth rate, might have been to ensure that if not
French or German culture then at least one with a “European” face
would survive longer.
But why did the people of Europe and other Western countries
people decide to bring fewer children into this world? There are a
number of answers. In poorer societies, kids are parents’ social
security and their savings for rainy days. In agricultural
societies kids can help out their parents more than in
industrialized ones. And in poorer places, where people live in
relatively isolated, small villages, the only insurance one has is
the family and the tribe. Insurance companies emerge only when the
law of large numbers starts to apply. With financial markets and
government promising security and people counting on such promises,
parents might well have decided to have fewer kids.
The present decline must also be seen in another context. The
rapid growth of population during the 20th century, in so-called
emerging countries in particular, was inadvertent. Local
population, expecting a number of children to succumb to diseases,
did not immediately adjust to the impacts of vaccines, invented in
the West, which suddenly increased the number of surviving kids.
The declining birth rates today may be, in part, adjustment to the
fact that with more kids likely to survive until old age, parents
decide to have fewer to start with.
But the fact is that in many Western societies the fertility
rate is below the replacement level of roughly 2.1. Something else
is happening, beyond the above rational calculations. The pill, the
no-fault divorce, the 50% divorce rates, the longer years of study,
women having unprecedented career opportunities, all combine to
postpone having kids. And by the time couples decide, the fertility
clock might have run out of batteries. And there are other
factors.
In many ways, having kids is similar to taking on a large debt.
Parents owe everything to the kid: they brought him into this
world. The kid owes them nothing: he did not ask to be born. Most
parents fulfill such moral and monetary obligations. But before
they become a parent, calculations such as “Is it worth it, since I
cannot just fly to London or Cancun on the spur of the moment? Will
not be able to go out to restaurants and pubs at night? Will not be
able to just do, well, whatever I want?” cross young adults’ minds,
once they no longer expect kids to be “insurance” for rainy days.
What does convince such young adults to give up such personal
freedom, and take on a large debt in the shape of a kid?
At the risk of being accused of professional deformation, a
possible answer may be that youngsters do it for the same reason
KKR does a leveraged buy-out. Debt imposes a discipline. Time and
money spent on kids cannot be spent on various forms of
self-indulgence — golden girls in gold-plated Trump Towers. Unless
one is extremely disciplined and dedicated to work, or religious,
it is not too difficult to succumb to temptations, and have either
a pleasurable life, a dissolute one, or one of boredom. Most people
might not have such strong discipline. Having kids forces one into
a disciplined life. How we disguise this weakness in character with
the veil of language — that is another story. The fact is, more
people today choose to forego such self-imposed discipline, one
that religious institutions and a maze of custom and tradition
helped enforce in the past.
There might be an intangible factor too in the wish to have
kids: a desire for immortality. Few achieve it with their work
during their lifetime. The vast majority hopes they get a stake in
it by bringing children to this world. But “immortality” is a
religious idea, and with the weakening of religious institutions,
such desire was weakened too.
What could reverse the trend and induce the young generation to
have more kids? At this stage there is one thing perhaps: less
government paternalism, which anyway seems to be underway, as
governments have over-committed themselves to taking care of
people. Weakening these cradle-to-grave promises would allow family
ties to get stronger and people to become more disciplined; such
adjustments will help deal with looming risks and uncertainties.
Too much “care” can turn into an enemy of life. I realize that this
is the exact opposite of policies that the U.S., France, Canada and
other countries have been pursuing. But we know that these policies
have not had their desired impact. It is time to re-examine them
and perhaps apply the principle of “ownership” (“owning to
oneself,” that is, but better call it “accountability”) to family
life too.
It may just reverse Western countries’ demographic decline.
