Sadly, some things don’t have solutions
Another of those complaints about how we’ve got to do something because no one is having children any more:
You’d think that the vast range of activities put on for new parents would coincide with a boom in births. But the opposite is the case. The official fertility rate in England and Wales is at a record low, falling to an average of 1.44 births per woman. Figures published at the end of last year showed that the number of children born to British mothers has fallen by a quarter in 15 years.
That Monday afternoon mother and baby yoga class might have a waiting list, but outside of these bubbles the reality is that Britons are having far fewer children. An economic crisis is looming as a result.
Politicians have long been looking for solutions to the baby bust.
Many solutions have been suggested for that baby bust. None of which are really any good. Good, as in producing more babies. Suggestions have included things like free at the point of use childcare. The Nordics have that and their fertility rates aren’t anything other than higher by some tiny margin. Longer maternity leaves - ditto. Italy has a smaller gender pay gap and their rate is lower. Italy - and this is the reason their gender pay gap is lower - has a much greater propensity for married women with children to entirely leave the workforce and this doesn’t increase the rate either. Iceland has near total gender parity in everything and this doesn’t….
Everything that anyone ever proposes as a method of getting the birthrate up is being or has been tried somewhere in our contemporary world. None of them make any difference except at the tiniest of margins. None do push that rate even up to replacement levels.
Some things don’t have solutions.
The actual cause of this baby bust is opportunity costs. This modern world contains many more things to do than have children then hope for grandchildren. Therefore people are doing more of those others and less of the parturition. And that’s it. It’s possible to call this an effect of the economic liberation of women if we want to call it that. But that’s not wholly so - birthrates have fallen in places that don’t have much economic liberty for anyone as well.
As to what is done about it the liberal response is nothing. People now have a great deal more freedom about how to live their lives - that’s just a good thing. It’s actually the point of the whole civilisation adventure. The overall shape of society is something determined from the bottom up by those free choices made by individuals.
Oh, sure, sure, maybe we should have Icelandic equality, Nordic childcare, Italian pay gaps and all the rest. They might be nice things to have, might not be. But they’re not going to change the fertility rate because, where they exist, they don’t change the fertility rate.
Other than the abject stupidity of reversing a couple of centuries of economic progress there is no solution. As we say, some problems just don’t have them.
Tim Worstall