Why Aren’t We Having More Babies?

For decades, the great fear was overpopulation. Now it’s the opposite.

For decades, the great fear among demographers and politicians and environmentalists was overpopulation. One of the most successful communicators of this fear was Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist who in 1968 co-wrote The Population Bomb. It became a bestseller; Ehrlich appeared on The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson, multiple times. His most startling prediction was that in the very next decade, the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation, including 65 million in the U.S. He wrote that India was doomed, and that England “will not exist in the year 2000.” While Ehrlich made valid points about the challenges of a growing population, many of his predictions were spectacularly wrong. Still, scary predictions have a way of influencing behavior, and policy. In 1979, China announced its one-child policy, which lasted until 2015.

The fear of overpopulation hasn’t totally gone away, but it has been joined by a fear of the opposite: that there are now too few babies being born. Here’s an astonishing fact: the global fertility rate has fallen by more than half over the past 50 years. Why? The answer to that question is complicated — and any “solution” is even more so. Donald Trump has declared himself “the fertilization president,” and the Trump Administration has proposed a variety of policies: a $5,000 baby bonus; federally-funded fertility-education programs; even a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children.

So what has been driving lower fertility rates? One obvious answer — obvious at least to an economist — is the fact that millions upon millions of women have been entering the workforce. Here’s Matthias Doepke, a German-born economist who teaches at the London School of Economics.

We had a model of a clear gender separation of labor a generation ago, where many women were homemakers or would interrupt their careers for long periods. We are in a different phase now, where younger women and men have very similar aspirations. And that creates a tension that we haven’t fully resolved yet. It’s difficult to have two jobs and three or four children. So many people stop a bit earlier.

But Doepke points to something else too:

How we raise our children has changed. The nature of parenting is now quite different. The effort required has gone up, to some extent for cultural reasons but mostly, I would argue, for economic reasons — namely that parents perceive, perhaps correctly, that the stakes have risen in raising their children. A big part of that is rising inequality and rising stakes in education.

What Doepke is describing here is sometimes called “intensive parenting”; the late economist Gary Becker used to refer to this as parental investment and “child quality.” You could imagine the declining fertility rate as a positive sign that parents and would-be parents around the world are rethinking what it means to have children, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all. Still, we read headlines about falling fertility and how horrible that will be for the future economy. But is it? The answer isn’t at all clear, especially once you consider our history of terrible demographic predicting.

This episode of Freakonomics Radio is the first in a three-part series about the great arc of human life — inspired, in part, by Gustav Klimt’s famous painting “Death and Life,” pictured above. Your eye is perhaps first drawn (as mine was) to the healthy, chubby baby snuggling among a peaceful mass of caregivers; but then you see Death off the side, smiling over the scene, knowing that in the end he will win out. That’s the thing: life is finite; and life is precious. Does our knowing that it’s finite make it even more precious? That’s a deep question, one we probably won’t be able to answer during this series. But it will surely be hovering over every minute.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Why Aren’t We Having More Babies?”, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

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Districts across the country are facing shortages of school bus drivers. Can technology help? Zachary Crockett takes a seat in the back.
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