5 days ago
We're witnessing the slow extinction of the human race
'When the facts change', economist JM Keynes is supposed to have said to a critic, 'I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'
In a vast swathe of countries, there are more deaths each year than births. Across the world, annual population growth has dropped from more than 2 per cent 60 years ago to less than 1 per cent and falling.
Populations are ageing and shrinking with calamitous ramifications for economic dynamism and for the viability of welfare states. The facts have certainly changed, but contra Keynes, opinion – never mind action – is lagging well behind. Only slowly is humanity waking up to the possibility of a future in which history comes to an end, not in the kind of liberal utopia imagined by political theorist Francis Fukuyama, nor in the bang of the nuclear apocalypse feared during the Cold War, but in the whimper of the last person turning off the lights.
Somewhere, some group or other with a pro-natal urge is likely to keep humanity going. But if the examples of the worst performing societies in East Asia are replicated – where a hundred parents make 33 children who make 11 grandchildren – the end of the human race altogether is not impossible.
In the UK, where fertility rates have been below replacement level for more than half a century, feeble demography lies at the root of many if not most of the country's woes. Britain's increasingly upside-down population pyramid means society is less creative, productive and entrepreneurial, suffering from stultifying economic growth and placing ever greater burdens on the state. But ministers have been cautious even to comment on the matter. Keir Starmer was one of the first frontline politicians to have anything to say about the birth rate and the best he could muster amounted to little more than 'nothing to do with me'.
Although many governments are uneager to dip their toes into controversial and turbulent demographic waters, it is nevertheless incumbent on those of us who understand the issue to think about what policies might be adopted so that when, one day, the authorities in countries like the UK wake up to the population emergency (as they already have in many other places, from China to France) they have an idea of what to do about it.
Unlike hiking up interest rates to clamp down on inflation, this is not an easy matter. The mechanisms required to e ncourage people to have more children are not obvious and the remedies will not feed through into the workforce for the best part of 20 years. But the fact that it is difficult should not be a counsel of despair or inaction.
The first reaction of many identifying a problem is to demand the government throw money at it. But as we know, many governments have precious little money to throw at anything. So, as my fellow author Philip Pilkington and I will argue in a forthcoming book on demography and economics, the whole way that government spends money, the whole of the welfare state, will need to be redesigned around the family, encouraging, incentivising and nurturing the formation of the unit within which children can be born and flourish.
And the tax system should be redesigned around it, too. Those bearing the costs of producing a future cohort of workers are effectively bearing the costs of the existence of a future economy. Without children today, there will be no workers or taxpayers when today's cohort of the economically active age and retire.
Reorienting the state, nation and economy towards families and childbearing – that is, towards the state, nation and economy having any kind of future – will take multiple forms. Childcare will need to be made more available and affordable. Planning restrictions which prevent the widespread creation of housing suitable for families will have to be smashed. Un-means-tested benefits for the elderly will need to be amended. The tax and benefits system penalising those who want to have children will require a complete overhaul.
But however important it is for governments to start acknowledging the problem of too few births and doing something about it, economic incentives alone will not fix this problem. There is evidence that a suitable tax system stimulates family formation, that affordable childcare encourages working mothers to have more children, and that baby bonuses do indeed stimulate childbearing. But the effects are modest.
In the UK, plenty of young people today say that they cannot afford to have children, and with housing out of the reach of many, nurseries wildly expensive by international comparisons, and the tax burden on young families indefensible, they deserve our sympathy and assistance. But in parts of the UK where housing is relatively cheap, the birth rate is not noticeably higher than where it is expensive. In countries where childcare is highly subsidised (Germany, the Baltic States), the problem has not improved. Recent data from the US shows that, while the better-off still have more children than middle-earners, the drop-off in arrivals on the maternity wards is affecting even the wealthiest.
What is required, above and beyond any changes to tax and spend, is a cultural revolution which transforms coupling-up and having children from a distant aspiration to an urgent priority. Films and novels, internet influencers and education should orient around this goal.
So many influences from the cultural sphere today are negative. Sex education focuses on prevention and disease rather than positively encouraging planned pregnancy. Instagram accounts are more focused on kittens than kids.
Changing the culture is even harder than changing the material incentive structure, but it is the only way we stand a realistic chance of returning to a world in which the average couple having an average of two or three children is the norm. It is the only alternative to a terminal decline and a long farewell.
