Among other things, the unlamented former autocrat Viktor Orban was one of the leading proponents of pro-natalist policies, and more open than most about the racist underpinnings of his view. However, like others who have tried to raise birth rates, he wasn’t particularly successful. To understand why not, it’s useful to consider the question: how many babies do we want. In particular, since their choices are the relevant ones, how many babies do young women want?
Three distinct concepts are relevant here: the ideal number (a normative answer to a survey question), the intended/expected number (what respondents plan to have or think they will actually have), and the actual number (completed fertility). These diverge in systematic and informative ways.
Start with the ideal. Across most high-income countries, around 50-60% of young women report an ideal family size of two children, with a smaller group preferring 3 and another, smaller group preferring 1, Only a small number see childlessness, or large families of four or more children, as ideal. This has been relatively stable for decades, despite large changes in education, labour markets and gender roles. In Australia, Europe and North America, the modal response is still two, with a minority favouring one or three, and very few choosing zero as an ideal. However, there has been a gradual decline in the mean ideal family size over time, with more women reporting an ideal size of one or zero.
Next, consider intentions When young women are asked how many children they intend (or expect) to have, the number is consistently lower than the ideal, typically by about 0.2–0.5 children on average, and the gap is larger for the youngest cohorts. That is, as ideal family size has declined, expected family size has declined slightly faster. Most importantly it has been below replacement, at least since the 1990s. Expectations are also more sensitive to circumstances. They fall when housing costs rise, when career paths become more uncertain, and when partnership formation is delayed. In other words, expectations embed a constraint set: they are a forecast conditional on anticipated economic and social conditions.
Two further patterns are worth noting. First, the gap between ideal and expected fertility is larger for more educated young women, reflecting steeper career–family trade-offs and later partnering. Second, the share of young women expecting to remain childless has risen, even though very few state childlessness as an ideal.
Finally, actual fertility. This is where the big drops have shown up. Completed fertility for recent cohorts in most OECD countries is now around 1.5–1.7 children per woman, and period TFRs are often lower still, especially after the post-GFC and pandemic shocks. Australia has moved from around replacement (near 2) in the late 2000s to roughly 1.6 or below in recent years. For women currently in their twenties, completed fertility will almost certainly end up below both their stated ideals and their early expectations, unless there is a substantial reversal of current trends. For a while it seemed as if births were merely being postponed, but this does not seem to be be the case any more.
In short, when young women are asked how many babies they want, they still mostly say two. When asked what they expect, they say something less. And what actually happens is less again. For policy, the distinction matters. If the objective were to raise fertility, measures that relax constraints—housing affordability, childcare, predictable career paths, and support for combining work and parenting—are the natural levers.
Changing society to make it more child-friendly is difficult but feasible. Given the massive monetary and labour cost of raising children, no subsidy is going to have a significant effect on ideal or planned numbers. But the removal of constraints like the absence of childcare can reduce the gap between palnned and actual births.
Other constraints are harder to fix. Most importantly, plans for having children commonly anticipate a stable life partnership, which cannot be guaranteed. The same is true of fertility problems. Finally, for some parents, the experience of having a first child is traumatic as a result of health problems, postpartum depression or the failure of the transformative experience of parenthood to offset the loss of freedom it entails. The result, often, is a decision to stop at oen
With better institutions and economic policy, it might be psssible to reverse the increase in the gap between intentions and outcomes that has occurred this century. That might raise births by between 0.2 to 0.3 children per woman. That’s not enough to push fertility above replacement. But it would rule out the collapse scenario we see in places like South Korea, where the combination of patriarchal norms and a modern economy makes childbearing an unappealing choice for most young women.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
MisterMr 04.14.26 at 1:58 pm
So, personally I don’t thonk that right now we have to worry too much about denatality, because the world is quite overpopulated; OTOH at some point, say in 2060 or 2100, denatality has to stop or humanity will go extinct.
Thgis leads to a pair of questions that for me are interesting, although I don’t expect to be answered nor that we need to answer them now:
First, is there a way (even just in line of principle) to determine what is the ideal amount of population?
and
Second, once we know what that number is, is there a way to align incentives so that the population will somehow stay there?
In past times, the total amount of population was regulated by a lax form of malthusian limits; lax because in reality people didn’t really live at the brink of starvation, various systems such as delayed family formation existed, but overall things worked like a malthusian system with a sort of moderate buffer.
Malthusianism sucks in various ways, so what exactly can take its place (upper limit)?
And perhaps the reverse effect can work to push population up (lower limit)?
engels 04.14.26 at 7:58 pm
is there a way (even just in line of principle) to determine what is the ideal amount of population?
Once more into the breach…
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
Alex SL 04.14.26 at 10:19 pm
MisterMr,
Not sure why you think it would be as early as 2060 or 2100? Assuming each woman has only one child on average, assuming a generation time of 30 years, for simplicity of the calculation counting only people 1-30 years as “the population”, and starting with a “population” of, say, two billion, there would still be 62.5 million people 1-30 years in 2180. And again, that means there would be considerably more people if we add the 31-90 year-olds that would logically have to exist at the same time. Even by 2300 there would still be millions of people. Sure, even I would say that such hypothetical population reduction could stop somewhere at hundreds of millions, but tens of millions in ca. 2200 is nonetheless very far from extinction.
Then, of course, a world of only tens of millions of humans would be so deeply transformed that expecting the economic structure, social mores, and preference for number of children per family to be the same as today seems unrealistic. More realistically, economic and social changes will take place because of the impacts of climate change and resource overuse. (Just a few days ago I read an article summarising a recent study of unsustainable groundwater use. The near-term future for the Middle East and the triangle Mexico-California-Texas looks particularly bleak, but Europe’s doesn’t look great either. Because of this, entire agricultural regions and urban centers of tens of millions of people will be abandoned in the next few decades even if climate change were to be arrested tomorrow, which it won’t.)
It seems highly unlikely to me that once our descendants have gone through the (from a European and North African to Indian perspective) third ‘dark age’ of population collapse, implosion of organised states, and mass migration, they will find themselves in a world of stable career paths for women who get to decide that they only want one child. I do not want that world that I foresee coming. I do not say, don’t worry, those women will get back into the kitchen soon, haha. I wish we would get a socialist solarpunk utopia with free childcare instead. I am merely saying that where we seem to be headed based on current trends is not going to be scenario where realised preferences remain at one child per family until the last human on the planet turns the lights off.
Tm 04.15.26 at 7:07 am
“around 50-60% of young women report an ideal family size of two children”
What is meant by “ideal family size”, as opposed to the “intended”? It’s not quite clear to me. What does it mean to say “I think 2 children would be ideal but I’ll rather just have 1”?
An interesting survey question for older respondents would be “in retrospect, would you rather prefer to have had more or less children than you actually have”?
D. S. Battistoli 04.15.26 at 11:40 am
Orban supported state-sponsored efforts to increase total factor fertility, but so too have French governments from across the political spectrum.
But I get what John is saying. I think that part of the challenge might be that declining birth rates have lately tended to drive (or at least consistently precede the fact of) rich countries to vote for the far right, which in turn supports pro-natalist policies (which may be among the less heinous things they support.
A lot of it seems to be a matter of comparative birth rates, which might not be surprising for students of the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars. Support for Marine Le Pen, notwithstanding her racism, is suprisingly high in the majority-minority French outremer. In Mayotte and French Guyane, some beneficiaries of the total set of policies of the French state look less than kindly their high-birth-rate neighbors from less -wealthy countries, many of whom do not believe that the accident of birth on one or another side of a border should be this determinate of lived trajectories.
We can point out that the Orbans and Vances of the world want their concitizens to make more babies, among other strange desires that they may have. But viewed from the Global South, watching the greater North Atlantic grey and thrash about against the dying of the light is not just unpleasant: it has negative effects on the lives of people from Global Majority countries.
I wouldn’t mind if the northerners either started having more kids, or learned how to let go of the collective complexes that seem to come with low TFF.
Nathan Lillie 04.15.26 at 4:34 pm
Reducing the human population via birth rates falling short of replacement is the best option we have, because the alternative is for the death rate to increase, due to resource depletion. The fewer people there are, the less drain on the world’s resources from human activity will occur, and we will eat the planet up a little more slowly.
Assuming this is even an issue (assuming we don’t go extinct from our own stupidity), in a couple of centuries our great-great-great grandchildren maybe should start to think about pro-natalist policies. Or not. That’s really their decision.
I am more worried about the what this says about optimism for the future in contemporary society. Young people understand very well that their idiot elders are destroying the planet they are meant to live on, hoarding all the resources for themselves, and that they’ll have to compete with AI and robots to earn a living to raise children who will probably just die in the hell world of the future. So low birth rates could be seen as a rational response to the gloomy future we all face. Is it moral to bring a child into this world? I am not sure it is.
MisterMr 04.15.26 at 7:54 pm
@engels 2
I have strong doubts about the “repugnant conclusion”; some day ago I read in some pop article that some scientist determined that the long terme sustainable level of world population at present levels of consumption is of roughly two billions and one half, but I don’t know how they calculated that number nor what is meant by “sustainable”.
However certainly the number can’t be “infinite” as per the repugnant conclusion because at some point you reach a situation where you have and “Easter Island” ecological collapse (yes I know the Easter Island story is dubious).
@Alex Sl
I was assuming a target desired population of about 2.5 billions, that from a peak of 12 billions takes only 2 generations if each generations halves.
But, I don’t know exactly how tò determine the “target” number. I don’t see why we should be going as low as you say, since at some point denatality has to stop, and stopping it at any point of the curve poses all the same problems, there is no reason to go below whatever the sustainable population number is, and It can’t be much lower than that (we reached one billion around 1800 and even of you want tò go lower than that it only takes other 2 generations).
Tm 04.16.26 at 6:59 am
Battostoli: “part of the challenge might be that declining birth rates have lately tended to drive (or at least consistently precede the fact of) rich countries to vote for the far right, which in turn supports pro-natalist policies (which may be among the less heinous things they support.”
I too think there is an interrelation between declining birth rates and the rise of fascism, although the causative mechanisms are not clear. I don’t see however that right wing governments really implement (as opposed to talking about the need for) “pro-natalist” in the sense of family-friendly policies. The Trump regime certainly hasn’t. What they do instead is demonize and in some cases terrorize the very immigrants their economies can’t do without, attacking the queer community, and in some cases trying to make abortion and contraception harder to get.
The “white” (for lack of a better word) part of the human family is numerically in decline (both relative and absolute) and this trend is not reversible. White nationalists or fascists or however we call them will continue to rage and raise hell against their demographic future but there is nothing they can really do about it. So they will double down on hate and terror and fascism, thereby making any rational policy response impossible and hastening the decline of the West even more.
The rise of fascism in the 20th century happened in a totally different demographic situation – remember “Lebensraum”? This has important consequences. I think for example that Putin’s Imperial Russian project is already doomed by demographics. Have you looked at that population pyramid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia