To entirely misunderstand fertility rates

A complaint - in The Guardian where else - that the United States doesn’t have that all encompassing womb of paid maternity leave, free child care and on and on that is more normal in the social democracies of Europe. This is what is causing the American fertility rate to fall:

But the reality of why American families are smaller is not about a failing national character or a decline in women’s femininity. It’s about money.

We agree it’s about money often enough but the analysis here gets it the wrong way around. For the surprising thing about the US fertility rate is how high it is compared to those social democracies. It’s higher than the EU average, certainly. What’s more, there’s a very strong relationship between higher incomes and lower fertility. American incomes tend to be higher than EU and when accounting for that the US rate is very much higher than we’d expect it to be.

Far from the absence of all those cocoons lowering the American birth rate the thing to be explained is why it’s so high.

As to why the link between average incomes and fertility the usual explanation is opportunity costs. In a richer society there are simply more things to do which means less of any one of them get done.

The complaint also goes wrong in detail:

Women, after all, are paid notably less than men, a trend that is especially dramatic when women of color are compared with their white male peers,

The opportunity costs of having children are therefore lower for women in the US as they’re giving up smaller - compared to US men that is - incomes. The disparity in incomes being greater for blacks as is also the fertility rate.

We’re fine, really, with discussions about what ought to happen here. Perhaps that just society does require all be taxed to raise other peoples’ children. But as with any other discussion of what ought to be it’s necessary to get right and understand what is already happening. Given that the US fertility rate is higher than that of Europe a demand to adopt European policies to raise the American fertility rate seems doomed to failure.