Thank you! This is something that hardly ever gets mentioned in those (all too creepy, if you ask me) discussions about how to get women to start churning out those babies. A low birth rate isn’t a sign of policies gone bad, it’s a sign of prosperity.

I don’t think the connection between wealth and fertility is automatic. Quebec once had a fertility rate of 4.0,right before the Quiet Revolution. It wasn’t exactly the richest place, but it wasn’t comparable to Sub-Sahara Africa, either.

One thing to remember about the fertility rate in poorer countries, is that it doesn’t tell the whole story. If a woman has six kids, and only three of them make it to age five, the fertility rate of 6 distorts the picture of population growth. Places with high fertility also have high infant mortality.

I think prosperity alone doesn’t explain the low fertility rate. There are cultural factors as well. If women start having kids when they’re age 28 instead of age 18, of course that’s going to affect fertility. Now higher education, employment aspirations, etc do affect age of childbearing, but it’s not automatic. There’s nothing that says a woman who starts having kids at 25 can’t have four children. But there are many factors that contribute to this.

Anyhow, thanks for posting.

democraticspace:

Great to see you addressing this topic.

Yes, baby bonuses are expensive. But these are required to counter the two biggest fertility problems that we have – social security and universal healthcare. These programs remove one of the main motivations behind having kids – who needs kids to take care of them when the state will do it.

Since the state is primarily responsible for the low fertility, the state should enact policies to reverse the trend. Money is no object because the alternative is population implosion and economic stagnation.

Of course my choice would be to eliminate univeral health care and social security programs, but that won’t go over well politically just yet. In the meantime it is not unreasonable for the state to provide between a $10k and $20k fertility incentive.

dave – the evidence suggests that incentives don’t produce a meaningful difference in fertility rates. Maintaining current immigration levels, Canada will continue to grow and will not stagnate. The real issue isn’t the low population growth of the developed world, it’s the unsustainably high population growth of the developing world. Like I said, low fertility is common is all affluent societies.

Low fertility is common to all affluent societies – yes.

But geopolitical power, and the security that brings its nation’s citizens, will accrue to those societies that are affluent AND have a high population growth.

The US will be dominant for decades. Maybe India will determine international public policy next, but that is a half cenntury away, if it happens at all.