Paying people to have more kids won't make them have more kids
At least not enough to stop what's coming
South Korea is the latest country to propose a “benefits boost to rescue its population.” Like virtually every First World country in the world, South Korea is seeing cratering fertility rates. Actually even by those standards South Korea is experiencing an horrific fertility decline, with only about 0.72 births per woman of childbearing age—that is to say, South Korean women on average give birth to 3/4 of a baby per year. You need to combine the output of two mothers there to realize even one baby. That is the kind of population graph that spells economic disaster and eventually national extinction. In short order there won’t be any South Koreans to be South Korean. That will be it.
The policy-wonk solution here is, yes, a “benefits boost.” This is not unique to South Korea: France, Taiwan, Italy, Greece, they’re all desperately trying to pay people more in order to have more babies. This has been the thinking for decades: If we want mothers and fathers to have more babies, the government needs to pay them for it. People are foregoing child-rearing because they don’t have enough money to do it; if they have enough money—i.e., if the government gives them enough money—they will start to have children. Quod erat demonstrandum.
I don’t really think we need a trigonometric proof to spot the utter fallacy at work here, namely: People have been having babies for hundreds of thousands of years without anyone paying them to do it. Indeed, fertility rates were considerably higher even in the relatively recent past, well before government payouts for babies even existed; more to the point, those high fertility rates occurred amid nearly universal poverty and destitution. In 1800 the per-capita GDP of the United States was about $1,300; right now it’s about $75,000. In the former era, running water was an opulent luxury; in the latter, you’re probably reading this on a supercomputer in your pocket. Can you guess which era had higher birthrates? Can you really, though?
Policymakers the world over want to pay people to have more children because the only way policymakers can interface with reality is through policy. They imagine life as a series of optimized input/output exchanges in which people are widgets and policies are widget lines, to be customized according to the needs of the moment. In effect they commit a form of the fallacy of reification, or “concretism,” in which they view the hypothetical stratagem as demonstrative of a proof that doesn’t really exist in the first place. “We haven’t yet paid people to have more kids, and they’re still not having more kids; therefore the problem is we’re not paying them to have kids.” That’s why these countries are trying to staunch these mortal wounds with programs that won’t work.
But we don’t really need to run this experiment to know the truth here. The truth is that people just don’t want to have children. That’s why they’re not having children: They just don’t want to have them. That’s it. There are numerous reasons why this is the case, though most of them seem to turn on the fact that people would just rather do without the heavy obligations and responsibilities of parenthood. People just like not having kids; they like to wake up late on weekends and eat when and what they want and take vacations without having to pack board books and teething toys and little bucket hats. I don’t think we have to overthink this! Having children is a fair bit of work and the majority of people seem averse to it and would rather their lives be much simpler and more inward-focused.
That, in any event, seems far more plausible than the claim that it’s “too expensive” to have kids. Many people are perfectly capable of affording to have kids, of course. For those that can’t there are a huge number of perfectly affordable birthing options available. If these families wanted to have children they’d seek those options out and utilize them. Here’s a great principle that has been true for many thousands of years: If people want to do something, they’ll do it. That has always been the case and it’s still the case. So if families want to have kids they’ll have kids. But they don’t so they’re not.
There are a lot of reasons that we got to this point; prominent among them, I think, is the fact that families who do have kids by-and-large no longer urge their children to get married and start families of their own. That’s just not really what anyone does anymore. How many families do you think promote the innumerable joys and the incalculable benefits of marrying young and having lots of children? It is profoundly unfashionable to do that; indeed the opposite is more likely to be true, families are more likely to discourage early family formation and childrearing and instead emphasize extended education, professional development, career options. The overall culture also bolsters this impulse; life for many young adults has become something of an extended adolescence, an endless procession of breweries, streaming movies, travel, local sports leagues, boozy brunches—all fun things in their own right, to be sure, but all of them part of a zeitgeist with catastrophic population decline at the end of it. And the secret to it all is: People just don’t want kids. They’d rather do something else.
This is, obviously, not an isolated phenomenon. Nearly half of U.S. adults in their prime childbearing years either don’t want children or are “not sure” if they want them. Childbearing being what it is, “I’m not sure” in these cases very often turns into “too late, I can’t.” And needless to say, the few children being born today will, after a few decades raised in the same senescent culture, go on to have even fewer children than their parents did. This crisis will compound on itself, and we will not be able to pay our way out of it. And in any event within a few generations the tax base will be so denuded that we wouldn’t even have the money to pay our way out of it. By that point many people may realize that it would’ve been a good idea to have a few children. By that point, of course, it will be too late. And that’s when it will all start to get really ugly.