May 4, 2024: Natalist Politics
Good evening. It is well known that throughout most of the world, birth rates, typically measured as total fertility rate (TFR), the number of children that the average woman is expected to give birth to in her lifetime, is declining. Birth rates are below replacement levels in much of the world, and for the world as a whole, are either just above or just below replacement rates. Several studies project that world population will peak in the 21st century (population may continue to grow for a while after TFR drops below replacement level for a technical reason known as momentum). I have been reluctant to write much about birth rates lately because I am frustrated by the lack of credible solutions. I have three purposes in bringing this up again today: first, there have been some interesting recent developments; second, I want to focus more on the politics rather than technical aspects; and third, my views have changed somewhat lately.
The impetus is the new NatalCon (Natal Conference), a pro-natalist conference, and an unflattering Politico article entitled “The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population”. The article highlights the association of the pronatalist movement with hostility to immigrants, opposition to women’s right such as education and work, eugenics, racism, and various pseudoscientific ideas.
It need not be this way. For some pro-natalist analysis without the baggage, I would recommend the Boom Campaign Substack and the Population News Substack. While I don’t endorse everything that the Institute for Family Studies publishes, the quality of their work tends to be good.
There are two main good arguments for pronatalism. The first comes from population ethics, that existence is an inherently good thing. The second is practical: a declining population and higher dependency ratio—the ratio of the labor force non-workers, especially retirees—will present a serious economic challenge and depress the standard of living. The culture war is not a good argument.
NatalCon might be new, but anxiety about population decline is not. A couple years ago, I wrote about depopulation in the Roman empire and how that phenomenon, which played out over several centuries, may have embrittled the empire and contributed to its breakup and collapse of the Western portion. However, from the research I reviewed, the main driver of depopulation was endemic disease rather than low birth rates. Exercise extreme caution if using the Roman experience to understand contemporary falling birth rates.
In the modern world, France led the way in fertility decline. Birth rates in France were similar to those in other European countries around 1800, but after that, France’s numbers fell. This didn’t hamper Napoleon’s conquests, but by the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), and especially World War I (1914-1918) and France’s crushing defeat in World War II (1940), low birth rates, especially relative to Germany, became a major political issue. But there was no major government action until the administration of Édouard Daladier, just before World War II, enacted several pronatalist policies, including restrictions on contraception and abortion and public support for large families. Some policies persisted during the Vichy regime and after World War II. In 2022, France’s TFR stood at 1.79, below the replacement level of around 2.1, but the highest in the European Union.
Between the world wars, low birth rates, and concern about them, spread throughout the industrialized world. Contemporaneous perspectives focused on cultural aspects, identifying “individualism, secularization, rationalization, and consumerism”, and consequently sound more like speakers at NatalCon than current academic demographers. Then the eugenics movement was at a height in the United States, and concern about low birth rates, particularly among “genetically fit” people, prompted a movement toward positive eugenics, or efforts to get the fit to have more kids. Examples of this include the “Fitter Family Contests”, which started at the Kansas State Free Fair in 1920. The flip side is negative eugenics, which seeks to prevent breeding, perhaps by forced sterilization, of those perceived to be unfit and to prevent immigration, especially of those perceived to be of inferior races. When considered this way, antinatalism and pronatalism are not necessarily the polar opposites that they might first appear. I wrote about eugenics in greater detail last year.
Like many other industrialized countries, Germany experienced low birth rates during the interwar period, and increasing those numbers was a high priority of the Nazi government from when they took power in 1933. Heinrich Himmler attempted to make the SS an example to the nation of childbearing. The Law of Encouragement of Marriage, passed also in 1933, provided newlyweds with a 1000 mark loan, and 250 marks would be forgiven for each child the couple had, up to 4 children. There were various laws to protect women’s health, particularly that of pregnant women. The Nazis took a “traditional” view of women in that their role was of homemakers and rearers of children. From 1938 to 1944, the German government awarded 4.7 million Mothers’ Crosses to mothers of at least four children, provided that both parents were German-blooded and that the children were raised in accordance to Nazi ideals. A contemporaneous study finds some evidence that the Nazis’ pronatalist policies were effective; even in a totalitarian state, people do response to incentives.
Perhaps the most aggressive policies in modern times came not from a fascist regime, but from communist Romania. In 1966, concerned about low birth rates, that country’s dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu instituted a range of pronatal policies, including Decree 770, which banned abortion and contraception in most cases, as well as mandatory gynecological exams and pregnancy monitoring for employed women under 45, and high taxes for unmarried people over 25 and childless couples without a valid medical reason. All this was enforced by the secret police. There were not positive measures, such as payments for new parents, maternity leave, and family income supplements, perhaps because of Romania’s bad financial position.
Romania’s policies were effective in the short term, with TFR spiking from 1.9 in 1966 to 3.7 in 1967. However, birth rates declined in the 1970s, with TFR reaching 2.1 in 1983, and then they cratered after 1989, when Ceaușescu became the only communist dictator in the Eastern bloc to be violently overthrown, an event that unfolded on live television in what was supposed to be a dreary speech on December 21, 1989. Without adequate support for the baby boom, Romania’s pronatal policies led to thousands of children being abandoned to orphanages, where conditions were bad. Education was also greatly strained, as there were not enough teachers. All this should be a lesson for the pro-life movement as well: a policy that is all sticks and no carrots will have serious negative side effects and will not engender public goodwill.
This could go on for a long time, but I’ll conclude the tour of pronatalist policies with present day Hungary. In 2015, Viktor Orbán’s government introduced a generous subsidy for children, called the CSOK, for which, depending on circumstances, the payout would be the equivalent of 15,000-62,000 extra dollars for the third child. Adjusting for income, an equivalent policy in the United States would be worth $40,000 to $250,000 for the third child. TFR in Hungary increased from around 1.2 in 2011 to 1.6 in the early 2020s. However, a sharp increase began in 2012, predating the CSOK. Lymon Stone at IFS documents some evidence, albeit rather limited, that these policies did indeed modestly boost birth rates. For those with access to Twitter, preliminary numbers suggest that TFR has fallen again to 1.38 so far in 2024, and so for whatever benefit the Hungarian policies may have, they do not seem likely to get the country anywhere near replacement level.
For many readers, especially those who are around my age or older, natal policies are more likely to be designed to reduce birth rates rather than increase them. Following the post-World War II baby boom, an overpopulation panic set in, and with it, several major coercive population control policies. China’s now-defunct One Child Policy and India’s forced sterilization, aided and abetted by the United Nations Population Fund, are associated with such gross human rights abuses that very few people openly advocate for population control today. Instead, one is more likely to hear euphemisms such as “female empowerment”, even with explicit antinatalist objectives. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which in 1968 forecast imminent famine due to overpopulation, and many other such neo-Malthusian writings have proven to be embarrassingly wrong, and as I argued last year, the idea that high human population levels have a negative effect on the environment is based on faulty reasoning.
Nevertheless, the anti-natalist orientation of much of current demography and the NGO world persist. The narrative is spelled out here by Max Roser, with the last update earlier this year. The story is that to reduce birth rates—Roser does not question that this is a desirable goal—better economic opportunity and education, especially for girls, is desirable so that women will choose to pursue careers instead of having families. Roser’s story is a convenient one that NGOs like, but it has many flaws. For example, he claims that China’s One Child Policy did not have any effect on long-term birth rates; contrary to that, Daniel Goodkind estimates that it prevented 360-520 million births. This is a case, I am afraid, where Roser is using data to tell the story he wants to tell rather than following the evidence where it may lead.
I don’t think anyone is fooled by the sudden interest that population control organizations have taken in girls’ education, but the narrative that so many NGOs like to tell, that pronatalist goals are fundamentally in conflict with the rights of women, is a compelling one. Many studies have shown, for instance, that legalized abortion depresses birth rates, and so this is an issue that starkly pits natalist objectives, to say nothing of moral objectives to abortion, against perceived women’s rights. The fact that speakers at NatalCon are openly calling to restrict women from working obviously does not help, nor does it help that the vast majority of speakers at NatalCon were men. This is something that pronatal advocates need to deal with much better.
What precedes is very far from a comprehensive review of natalist policies in the modern world. There are many other things I would like to discuss but will have to save for another day, such as the impact of Sweden-styled welfare and Russia’s natal policies in the 2010s. But from this, I take away a few conclusions.
Though it may be unsatisfying to point to France as a successful pronatal country because they too are below the replacement rate, France is one of the very few countries that have not only increased birth rates relative to its neighbors, but have sustained that increase over generations. Most other examples I reviewed, such as Nazi Germany, communist Romania, and possibly Hungary today, as well as Russia in the 2010s, achieved only temporary fertility spikes which lasted until the policies inevitably ran into problems, and in some cases, those spikes had very serious negative side effects. France’s policies worked better because they had broad social buy-in. They were not imposed by dictators, nor were they explicitly partisan and divisive such as in Hungary today.
In this regard, the activists at NatalCon are very far off course. Some are explicit about their culture war aims; the idea that the goal of natalism is to outbreed their political opponents is obviously not going to win broad social buy-in—not that politics are hereditary anyway. Ideas like banning women from working and bringing back eugenics are obviously not going to fly in a democracy.
Another thing that pronatal advocates need to think about is, if they actually are successful in finding a way to induce significantly higher birth rates, how to care for a new baby boom. This paper estimates that population aging shaved off 1.2 percentage points of GDP growth in the United States in the 2010s, with another 0.6 pp expected in the 2020s. Among wealthy countries, the US has been one of the more lightly hit countries. If a new baby boom occurs, it will take 20 years before the enlarged generation enters the work force, so the even larger dependency ratio in the intervening time will be a double whammy on growth. Many pronatal activists want to end immigration as well, so that then is a triple whammy. How is all this going to work? I don’t have the impression that many pronatalists have thought it through. The experience of Romania tells us that we absolutely have to be prepared to take care of kids if we want more of them.
Aside from failing to consider the ramifications of more children and the lack of any realistic solutions for bringing them about, I simply don’t have the impression that most pronatal activists are serious, despite their claims that birth rates are an existential issue for civilization. Instead, I see a lot of culture war posturing. Once again, the Shirky Principle applies: for politicians and an emerging cluster of activists and think tanks, low birth rates are a great tool for campaigning and fundraising, and so the last thing they would want to do is solve the problem.
In contrast to alarmist statements by many activists, including—mea culpa—me in the past, I no longer think that low birth rates are a serious threat to civilization or our well-being, though I do think it would be better if birth rates were above the replacement level. I am less worried now for two reasons. First, from countries that are in the vanguard of population aging, especially Japan, it looks like population aging and decline is a drag on growth, but that these countries are doing OK. Second, youth unemployment is a serious problem. While youth unemployment has decreased a bit from post-COVID highs, it remains far higher than in the 1990s. This tells me that the workforce in most countries can contract without inducing any labor shortage.
Perhaps what makes low birth rates so scary is that—misplaced overconfidence in canned stories like what Max Roser tells notwithstanding—we don’t really have a good explanation of why birth rates are falling, and so many of us are inclined to assume the worst. Yes, if the whole world fell to South Korea levels of fertility, then we would be in serious trouble. But nothing like that will plausibly happen. This is, in many ways, a parallel to the overpopulation panic of the 1960s and 1970s, when well-informed people thought it inevitable, absent draconian intervention, that population would grow to the point of Malthusian catastrophe. Let us have sensible responses, such as support for families with children, effective education, and sufficient housing so that it is not so expensive. These solutions will not get all countries back above replacement levels in the foreseeable future, but in the meantime, I think we will be all right.
Quick Hits
Phew, that was long, even by my standards.
There is news on federal permitting, which I discussed a couple weeks ago in the context of geothermal energy. The Department of Energy is proposing a new NEPA interpretation that would add new categorical exclusions for certain solar, battery, and transmission projects, while strengthening NEPA in general to encompass environmental justice consideration. You can read the rule here. Rather strangely, it calls for explicit consideration of “Indigenous Knowledge” without ever defining the term. This vagueness is an open invitation for arbitrary judgments, and the categorical exclusions are an escape for politically charismatic projects from harsh regulatory treatment. Overall, this is a step in the wrong direction. Thanks to Eli Dourado for some analysis that I used. Outgoing Senator Joe Machin also doesn’t like it and is working on a Congressional Review Act resolution to overturn the rule, but if such a resolution is passed, it will certainly be vetoed, and the veto will not be overridden.
Tucker Carlson recently published an interview with Alexander Dugin, and so I highly recommend Robert Zubrin’s explanation of who Dugin is and his ideology. Here’s an English version of Dugin’s various works. See also, this explanation of National Bolshevism, an ideology that is meant to combine the “best” of Bolshevik communism and Nazism, and Eurasianism. It should be noted, though, that in contrast to Zubrin’s claims, the extent of Dugin’s influence over Putin’s policies is disputed. It is also disturbing to consider why Carlson would think that Dugin, who openly advocates fascism and the destruction of the United States, is someone who should be valorized.
Libertarian activist Joshua Eakle (Twitter) characterizes the ascent of the Mises causus in the Libertarian Party as a hostile takeover with the intention of destroying the party from within. If so, then the operation was successful, as both the party’s principles and influence are now in the toilet.
Ted Nordhaus writes about his experience working with Michael Shellenberger and their parting of ways. Shellenberger left The Breakthrough Institute a few months before I joined in 2016, though I had the chance to visit his subsequent outfit, Environmental Progress, a few times. Shellenberger is someone who I once respected highly from afar, but now I find it difficult to take him seriously.