The Economist this week suggests that rich countries need to get out of the asylum business. Only a tiny fraction of those displaced by war and persecution ever make it to a rich country, where international convention requires them to be taken in. (This refers only to those people whose asylum claims are actually accepted as bona fide, not the millions who use the asylum system and its interminable appeals as a "Let me stay in your country free even if you don't want me and and my unproductive family" card. The Economist suggests that rich countries should instead assist people to be harboured in the first safe country they reach, which might be right next door to the conflict country, not 8000 miles away in rich countries with generous welfare states.
If we stopped doing asylum, we would be better able to assess newcomers who fetch up in international arrivals in YYZ and YVR. If they are likely to be useful to us, they can stay, maybe. If not, back they go to wherever they came from. They don't get to stay just because they have a sob story about being persecuted in some African hell-hole because they are bisexual or something. This is probably necessary for immigration to retain whatever popular support it still has. It has to be for our benefit to the labour pool and willingness to assimilate, not to the sole benefit of the asylum seeker.
I can't say what will happen. Maybe they'll stabilize... maybe they'll have mass immigration and radically alter their society. Maybe they'll be invaded by China and replaced.
I can say that Japan did restrict immigration and has not found a solution to their low birthrate.
I'll also say that there's no law of nature that says that societies and civilizations can't die. They have before. They can again. A certain set of choices may lead to such an outcome.
Japan's economy will likely falter if they don't start having young Japanese to do the work, making them an aging, depopulating, declining backwater that non-Japanese people will not want to move to, anyway....unless as colonizers to exploit its vast reserves of natural resources which are.....what?
Thank you, Jen, for writing about an issue that is not addressed and is indeed existential. It's not just about politics though. To me, it's also about a population having a deep commitment to the collective and not the individual. In Israel, as in other countries, every young person does 2-3 years of national service after high school. In times of peace, this means working with children, in food security, with seniors, in agriculture and other volunteer roles. This time together, in uniform, training, learning and living closely together fosters that sense of community. When you are in Israel, you see evidence of this cohesion everywhere. Families are also at the centre of Israeli culture. Most have at least three children -- it's just the norm. In Israel, you don't find people agonizing about whether to have a baby or rescue animal, they just do both and get on with it.
Bring back the baby bonus! Even the name of it included "Baby" in the vernacular. When I was a kid aka baby turning into a teenager, my mom gave me my baby bonus money to go and buy my own clothes. I learned how far a buck could go. Ah, the seventies...
Coop housing should be a big thing. Get the banks and insurance empires out of the way, somehow. Help municipalities give birth to radical co-op housing projects. If you want the deal, join the co-op and become part of a purposeful local community. Families with kids get in. The more kids give you a better rate. Remember, the residents share in the ownership and participate in the management and security. Win, win.
This alone could revive the fortunes of the NDP (sorry, that was a hallucination). But yes, co-op housing needs more support and promotion in the grand scheme of things. The cool thing about co-op housing is that each co-op can create its own brand, and target its ideal member, sort of like those radical people trying to make entirely separate religiously based communities, only on a much less radical scale.
Baby bonus as a govt program is a wrong approach. Instead, we should just treat children as people. Take the total family income, divide it among Mom and Dad and kids under 19, and have them pay tax individually. This would address the unfairness of 4 roommates sharing a house and making $200,000 among them paying far less tax than a family of 4 on the same income.
The baby bonus only encouraged the lower classes to have more children, where the monthly amount ($6 iirc) actually meant something. Parents who were better off might have found the money useful, but it was never going to incent them to have a third child.
I disagree. One of the rewarding aspects of parenthood is proving that you can meet the challenge. Falling back on government programs feels like failure.
Funny how there was no guilt feelings associated with it. My folks weren't dependent on it. I imagine they felt like they were enjoying and sharing in the prosperity of the nation in the postwar era. Still, the money was put to good use, at least that's the way I remember it.
The most extreme want to homeschool etc.? That’s kind of like the staff Sargent saying traditional values are extreme. I believe in homeschooling and I am no where near extreme. I voted for Trudeau’s first mandate and Notley’s as well but when their extreme ideology threatens my kids and grandkids I opt out.
Also, you have misread Rod Drehr, he does not advocate separation from society, he says we need to strengthen and shore up our communities. People make that claim but over and over again he explains that is a misreading most recently in the Pints for Aquinas podcast
Interesting article. However, there's a dimension of this conversation that was absent from the article, and needs addressing, I believe. You talk about the simple math of population sustainability and, on the other side, demographic collapse. But there's also the simple math of having spent the past few hundred years exponentially filling a finite planet with ever more humans, rapidly chewing through the carrying capacity of that finite planet.
People will argue about how near or far we are away from exceeding that carrying capacity (and many will argue that it was exceeded long ago), but it's clear that there are hard limits to landmass, to ecological function, to the ability to grow food. And the problem with growing population isn't just that we run out of space at a certain point. It's also that our economies are highly polluting of the ecologies we ultimately depend on. So more people don't just take up more space, they pollute and strain planetary ecosystems. At least, if they participate in a normative 21st century economy.
So while, on the one hand, population decline dooms much of our global economic foundation, on the other hand, ongoing population increase, even modest, dooms the ability of a fragile and finite planet to continue to accommodate us all.
I'd love to hear some further thoughts on this angle.
The main thing to say about over-population is that Canada doesn't need to worry about that problem.
As Jen noted, our fertility rate is 1.33. Talking about dealing with the potential problems of a growing population is a conversation to have when our fertility rate hits 2.0. (Still below sustainable, but close enough to growth to have that conversation sensibly.)
I would really recommend the book "Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline". As a lover of nature, I think we need the world population to decline, (and I say that without any "anti-natalist" or anti-human feeling) but that book made me realize it needs to be gradual, managed, and desired. But in any case- the main thesis of the book is that global population decline is probably going to be here sooner than has been predicted.
As long as all the starving and local environmental degradation occurs in poor, densely populated countries, who aren't participating in a 21st century western economy, I would say that is not something we in the West need to worry about. We should worry only if those destitute people can swim the Atlantic or the Pacific, or get here in inflatable Zodiac boats. Unlikely in their weakened condition.
This kind of thinking equates "us" to "all humans on earth, now and in the future". The biggest difference between "right" and "left" today is whether you think anything smaller or more local is more "us". Both sides tend to think the other is deeply immoral, if not also plain dumb. Hence the anger levels in our politics.
Both left and right also think that more local is more "us".
A lefty Vancouverite still pays far more attention to a house fire that kills a family of five in Vancouver than they do to the same thing happening in Switzerland.
The issue of morality only comes in when one side perceives the other as having no care at all for some more distant "us" or actually having more care for the distant "us" than the local.
I guess, but you can square the circle for the materialist by the gap between # of kids people want, and the # of kids people have. Its surprisingly huge
Nicely argued for a resurgence in child-bearing, but how to incentivize it? Nothing seems to work, not in a way that scales. Family values broadly construed are really important.
Second-wave feminism in the 1970s caught boomer women entering their child-bearing years at the full flood of also entering their peak career-development years. Trying to do both is really hard. My "Greatest Generation" mother abandoned her wartime and early post-war career to raise us, then went back when we entered high school. By going back I mean she earned a degree (two, eventually) that she needed by then to re-enter her career essentially at square one. Did the hiatus blight her lifetime earnings? Absolutely. Were we worth it? She says we were.
But here's the thing. During the time we were small and our parents were trying to pay off mortgages, feed us, and find some spare money for piano lessons, there was only one income bidding up the price of those things, not two. The dirty little secret is that women's work produces less wealth for each dollar of salary than men's does. My mother was a schoolteacher. No matter the influence she had on young minds, she didn't generate the wealth that my father did making and selling things that people wanted to buy with their own money. A lot of women's work today consists of women working in government bureaucracies creating pay equity and harassment regulations that other women working in corporate HR bureaucracies document compliance with. None of this generates any wealth at all. No one would purchase this work with his own money. (Women want taxpayers and the firms to do this work on their behalf, but they won't purchase it.)
So to all the extent that women work in careers that are nice to have (social work, teaching, civil service, HR, nursing, family medicine, NGOs) they don't create wealth. Female engineers and financial experts, you're off the hook. Many are financed entirely through taxes as part of the welfare state. Yet they draw salaries....and nowadays those salaries must, by law, be equivalent to the salaries that wealth-producing men get. What this means is that women's work is inflationary. The reason it seems to take two incomes for a family to stay afloat, but it mostly didn't in the 1950s, is that women's wages drive up prices without producing as many tradeable goods. And having children while working is just really damn hard. So even if the one family is better off with both working, the society is worse off, and makes the trade-off not to have children in order to prosper seem rational.
This leads obviously to a modest proposal that, since nothing else works, working mothers need to go out of fashion if we hope to kick-start fertility. In the short-term families will be materially worse off (although day care is really really expensive, sensible only if you really love your career) but over time, there will be less money chasing the tradeable goods that men (mostly) make, and single-income prosperity will return.
Of course this is just a talking suggestion. I'm sure there are lots of holes in it.
I'd rather say that the unproductive professions you mention (and many others, beginning with anything related to studies of social issues), as well as the bureaucracy that they feed, is what it must go. Working mothers in STEM or trades are always welcome.
The seemingly underwhelming effect of economic interventions needs is counter-balanced by the fact that small differences matter (a lot). 'Sub-replacement' birthrates have dramatically different social consequences depending on how close to replacement rate it is. The US birthrate hovered around 2 for a couple decades before the great recession, which is a rate at which it would take something like 15 generations for the number of babies to half. That's a society that 'looks' much like a demographically stable one across one lifetime, and if anything has environmental benefits. Compare to something like Germany's birthrate (1.5-ish) where the same decline takes just a few generations and probably destroys the safety net without immigration. Both the cultural and technocratic questions look different from the perspective that the 'gap' is meaningfully filled by half of women having just one more child, not engineering another baby boom.
If anything, there's also a cultural question to whether we'll have faith a society can and should sustain itself (without simply replacing the population with seemingly no eye toward cultural stability) in the long run even with temporary periods of moderate population decline. The idea that populations only grow and grow and grow and otherwise will not (or should not) exist is a fairly recent one -- it just used to take a lot more to stave off rapid decline. Not allowing the population to decline even a little undercuts some obvious ways (like cheaper housing and more opportunity) that things might rebalance, but those are long-term bets because actual population decline lags fertility by decades.
While the evidence suggests that pro-natalist policies and programs largely fail to reverse declining birth rates, appreciate your nuanced and informative discussion,.
As a new parent and talking to other parents, I have come to a new understanding of the cheap childcare laws. What is happening is Mom's no longer have any monetary excuse to stay at home with the child, no more "at least I'm saving $1000 per month". Children, from early infancy, are largely being raised in state (under) funded institutions
- I am using "Mom" in the deeply archetypical sense - dads can be "Mom"s too
- The solution isn't more funding, but letting stay at home parents get the same funding for childcare should be an option. The economics of scale should let daycare's come out ahead, and if it doesn't (e.g. 1 worker / 3 children + overhead) maybe this isn't what we should be funding
Out here in the hinterland, i feel surprised to see natalism become a big topic.
Your articles on fertility over the years have been key. This one tops them all - you don't need a great books program to include deep philosophy in your journalism :-)
As a preacher, I am sad to say the old historic churches in Canada (United, Anglican) have collapsed .i.e. from millions to tens of thousands, maybe a couple thousand baptisms every year. Meanwhile the RCs are being sustained by immigrants. Old Stock Canadians and their descendants don't care for Church/corporate worship. The new style religions - the mega church- look attractive, but they don't have wide spread appeal. 2,000 may show up, but this is minuscule relative to the wider population or the time period when 20% of Canadians went to Church.
The difference is fertility. If the new style religions, small as they are, continue to attract families, than over time they will grow, as you present.
***
As an aside, I am interested to seeing whether there is a connection between industrial/agricultural chemicals and fertility. I keep my eyes open for articles but see them rarely. Is this a news story waiting to happen?
The article should explain why declining population is an existential crisis. It would be, of course, if population decreased to zero, but there are positive feedbacks from a declining population: real wages increase; accessibility of health care increases; accessibility of child care increases; housing prices decrease and inflation decreases; all of which improve birth rates and general longevity.
Rapid population growth has thrown everything out of balance, and the present circumstances may reflect a natural struggle to bring back equilibrium.
The Century Initiative's predictions for a 100 million strong Canada in 2100 shows no improvement in per capita GDP vs much slower growth. The government will be able to collect more taxes, but we will have to live in a much more crowded country on land that used to feed us.
Say the population stabilizes at 30 million, where it was in 1997, just 28 years ago. Was that a worse time for Canadians, especially the youth? Not at all. Maybe we just have to live within our means.
> but there are positive feedbacks from a declining population: real wages increase; accessibility of health care increases; accessibility of child care increases; housing prices decrease and inflation decreases; all of which improve birth rates and general longevity.
That's incorrect.
It might be correct if the population declined in such a way that your age dispersal remained tilted towards youth. But it doesn't work that way. Declining population inverts your population and you get far more old people than young people. Roofers, doctors, teachers, child care workers etc... these aren't jobs for 70 year olds. but consuming health care IS something for 70 year olds.
So in the real world, a declining population means **less** accessible health care and child care... that puts strain on the social safety net and the young capable of having kids (who are less financially secure) are exposed to more economic pressure that pushes down birth rates.
The reason that too few young people to support the elderly is bad for young people rather than for old people is political, not economic. We've had higher dependency ratios before without any great hardship. The only reason a high old age dependency ratio is a greater burden than a high youth dependency ratio is because old people (despite their lesser stake in the future) can vote for more handouts at any long-term cost and children can't.
People aren't likely to give up the idea someone who might not see the next election should get an equal vote, sure. But, being needed is power too. Not sure it does actually make things worse for young people if older people know they're depending on a smaller and smaller group -- even Japan is realizing it's gerontocracy is going to have to give more breaks to the young than it has been.
> The reason that too few young people to support the elderly is bad for young people rather than for old people is political, not economic.
It's both. And it's personal too. The problem of the elderly requiring radically more health care dollars than young people means that you need the young to support the old because only a vanishingly rare number of people say "Mum shouldn't get to see an oncologist to treat her cancer because that will divert health care resources from me and my kids... so she can get her suicide pill instead".
Those are real tradeoffs. Paying for better K-12 education translates to paying less for cancer treatment for 75 year olds.
Even when the social safety net isn't involved, it makes a big difference.. when aging parents have only one child, it's massively different when one or both get dementia vs. if aging parents have two children.
> We've had higher dependency ratios
When? Canada has never had the inverted age pyramid that a population decline brings because we've never had this population decline.
1970 or so. Canada never had this many elderly people, but it was more than counter-balanced by a much greater number of children. Fewer workers than dependents (young and old together) to now, with again, the difference being that it was the workers rather than the children calling the shots (so entitlements didn't get to crowd out investment the way they do now).
I think you'd be surprised at how many people other than the elderly value mostly-futile care to minorly extend the lives of the very elderly if it comes at the expense of their children. It's a frankly juvenile perspective that every new medical advancement creates a new need that *must* be filled in a decent society -- the healthcare needs of the elderly are fundamentally unlimited and they can't be allowed to crowd out every other priority.
> 1970 or so. Canada never had this many elderly people, but it was more than counter-balanced by a much greater number of children.
That's not a period with a greater dependency ratio, it's the opposite. The 1970s had precisely the opposite demographic situation we are facing today.
Ask ChatGPT to show you a population pyramid for 1970 vs. 2025 and you'll see what I mean. (Then ask it for a projection for 2040 if immigration were normalized with 2005 levels or set to zero)
The fertility rate in 1970 was 2.3 which is above replacement levels and as a result, young people and middle aged people in their prime productive years massively outnumbered old people... meaning that Canada had a far more favourable dependency/productivity ratio.
You are making up your own definition of dependency ratio. The number of old people is not what it means: it's working age (usually defined as 15-64) vs *everyone* else, old and young. This ratio was higher in 1970 (90 dependents/worker) than it's projected to be by even 2050 (about 85 dependents/worker). Having more young dependents is not inherently more favourable.
I'm well aware of what the population pyramid looked like, and also that infants were not paying for grandma's healthcare or staffing the grocery store. Maybe you can have ChatGPT tell you whether it's easier to raise the retirement age by 5 years or put fifth graders to work.
Insightful article. Well done. I have told my child disdaining brother in law many times that evolution will automatically reduce the number of people with his attitude.
Fantastic, nuanced piece, thank you. I am reminded of a conversational dynamic that happens in my home, where I get all raged up about the excesses of either political extreme, and my partner sanguinely responds, 'Don't worry so much, it's a self-limiting phenomenon.' What this piece stirs up in me is that we seem to be missing a sense of deep rooting in place, and of community/family here in Canada. Some folks have it. But it seems like maybe not enough of us. I notice a lot of people acting on beliefs like 'I've got to do everything on my own' and 'I need to get everything I can out of this situation, for me and mine'; rather than "I belong, I have something to contribute, and my neighbours have my back." I don't have kids. But I do take family and community Auntie responsibilities seriously. And it seems like there isn't a strong template for that among people I know--so that even when they desperately want help, it doesn't always occur to them that there might be others who could nurture their child.
Your best article yet. I haven’t read them all, of course, but I thank you for articulating so many thoughts and questions that have been swirling around at the edge of my awareness, but still out of reach. This dilemma of exclusively ‘material answers to spiritual questions’ feels like the defining challenge of your generation. Please continue to write on these themes.
Having children is - in fact - one good way to “grow as a person”
The best way.
Indeed. It was one of the things my wife and I talked about before having kids, almost in those exact words.
If we tightly restrict immigration, we will, of necessity, find a solution over time.
If we don't tightly restrict immigration, "we" will simply cease to exist, and be replaced by another culture entirely.
The real question for each of us is whether "we", across generations, has any meaning at all.
The Economist this week suggests that rich countries need to get out of the asylum business. Only a tiny fraction of those displaced by war and persecution ever make it to a rich country, where international convention requires them to be taken in. (This refers only to those people whose asylum claims are actually accepted as bona fide, not the millions who use the asylum system and its interminable appeals as a "Let me stay in your country free even if you don't want me and and my unproductive family" card. The Economist suggests that rich countries should instead assist people to be harboured in the first safe country they reach, which might be right next door to the conflict country, not 8000 miles away in rich countries with generous welfare states.
If we stopped doing asylum, we would be better able to assess newcomers who fetch up in international arrivals in YYZ and YVR. If they are likely to be useful to us, they can stay, maybe. If not, back they go to wherever they came from. They don't get to stay just because they have a sob story about being persecuted in some African hell-hole because they are bisexual or something. This is probably necessary for immigration to retain whatever popular support it still has. It has to be for our benefit to the labour pool and willingness to assimilate, not to the sole benefit of the asylum seeker.
> If we tightly restrict immigration, we will, of necessity, find a solution over time.
Japan did that and hasn't.
Yet. Do you think their population will drop to zero? Or just low enough that other, non-Japanese people move in? Which is to say, mass immigration?
I can't say what will happen. Maybe they'll stabilize... maybe they'll have mass immigration and radically alter their society. Maybe they'll be invaded by China and replaced.
I can say that Japan did restrict immigration and has not found a solution to their low birthrate.
I'll also say that there's no law of nature that says that societies and civilizations can't die. They have before. They can again. A certain set of choices may lead to such an outcome.
Japan's economy will likely falter if they don't start having young Japanese to do the work, making them an aging, depopulating, declining backwater that non-Japanese people will not want to move to, anyway....unless as colonizers to exploit its vast reserves of natural resources which are.....what?
The Japanese may well prefer a faltering economy to ceasing to exist as a nation or a culture.
Thank you, Jen, for writing about an issue that is not addressed and is indeed existential. It's not just about politics though. To me, it's also about a population having a deep commitment to the collective and not the individual. In Israel, as in other countries, every young person does 2-3 years of national service after high school. In times of peace, this means working with children, in food security, with seniors, in agriculture and other volunteer roles. This time together, in uniform, training, learning and living closely together fosters that sense of community. When you are in Israel, you see evidence of this cohesion everywhere. Families are also at the centre of Israeli culture. Most have at least three children -- it's just the norm. In Israel, you don't find people agonizing about whether to have a baby or rescue animal, they just do both and get on with it.
Very timely topic. Thank-you.
Bring back the baby bonus! Even the name of it included "Baby" in the vernacular. When I was a kid aka baby turning into a teenager, my mom gave me my baby bonus money to go and buy my own clothes. I learned how far a buck could go. Ah, the seventies...
Coop housing should be a big thing. Get the banks and insurance empires out of the way, somehow. Help municipalities give birth to radical co-op housing projects. If you want the deal, join the co-op and become part of a purposeful local community. Families with kids get in. The more kids give you a better rate. Remember, the residents share in the ownership and participate in the management and security. Win, win.
This alone could revive the fortunes of the NDP (sorry, that was a hallucination). But yes, co-op housing needs more support and promotion in the grand scheme of things. The cool thing about co-op housing is that each co-op can create its own brand, and target its ideal member, sort of like those radical people trying to make entirely separate religiously based communities, only on a much less radical scale.
Baby bonus as a govt program is a wrong approach. Instead, we should just treat children as people. Take the total family income, divide it among Mom and Dad and kids under 19, and have them pay tax individually. This would address the unfairness of 4 roommates sharing a house and making $200,000 among them paying far less tax than a family of 4 on the same income.
Without a govt handout to families.
The baby bonus only encouraged the lower classes to have more children, where the monthly amount ($6 iirc) actually meant something. Parents who were better off might have found the money useful, but it was never going to incent them to have a third child.
I disagree. One of the rewarding aspects of parenthood is proving that you can meet the challenge. Falling back on government programs feels like failure.
Funny how there was no guilt feelings associated with it. My folks weren't dependent on it. I imagine they felt like they were enjoying and sharing in the prosperity of the nation in the postwar era. Still, the money was put to good use, at least that's the way I remember it.
Christ almighty Doug, that is a horrendously callous, cruel, and dismal moral judgment.
No, it is a personal view that applies to my life
Oh thank god
The most extreme want to homeschool etc.? That’s kind of like the staff Sargent saying traditional values are extreme. I believe in homeschooling and I am no where near extreme. I voted for Trudeau’s first mandate and Notley’s as well but when their extreme ideology threatens my kids and grandkids I opt out.
Also, you have misread Rod Drehr, he does not advocate separation from society, he says we need to strengthen and shore up our communities. People make that claim but over and over again he explains that is a misreading most recently in the Pints for Aquinas podcast
Interesting article. However, there's a dimension of this conversation that was absent from the article, and needs addressing, I believe. You talk about the simple math of population sustainability and, on the other side, demographic collapse. But there's also the simple math of having spent the past few hundred years exponentially filling a finite planet with ever more humans, rapidly chewing through the carrying capacity of that finite planet.
People will argue about how near or far we are away from exceeding that carrying capacity (and many will argue that it was exceeded long ago), but it's clear that there are hard limits to landmass, to ecological function, to the ability to grow food. And the problem with growing population isn't just that we run out of space at a certain point. It's also that our economies are highly polluting of the ecologies we ultimately depend on. So more people don't just take up more space, they pollute and strain planetary ecosystems. At least, if they participate in a normative 21st century economy.
So while, on the one hand, population decline dooms much of our global economic foundation, on the other hand, ongoing population increase, even modest, dooms the ability of a fragile and finite planet to continue to accommodate us all.
I'd love to hear some further thoughts on this angle.
The main thing to say about over-population is that Canada doesn't need to worry about that problem.
As Jen noted, our fertility rate is 1.33. Talking about dealing with the potential problems of a growing population is a conversation to have when our fertility rate hits 2.0. (Still below sustainable, but close enough to growth to have that conversation sensibly.)
I would really recommend the book "Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline". As a lover of nature, I think we need the world population to decline, (and I say that without any "anti-natalist" or anti-human feeling) but that book made me realize it needs to be gradual, managed, and desired. But in any case- the main thesis of the book is that global population decline is probably going to be here sooner than has been predicted.
As long as all the starving and local environmental degradation occurs in poor, densely populated countries, who aren't participating in a 21st century western economy, I would say that is not something we in the West need to worry about. We should worry only if those destitute people can swim the Atlantic or the Pacific, or get here in inflatable Zodiac boats. Unlikely in their weakened condition.
This kind of thinking equates "us" to "all humans on earth, now and in the future". The biggest difference between "right" and "left" today is whether you think anything smaller or more local is more "us". Both sides tend to think the other is deeply immoral, if not also plain dumb. Hence the anger levels in our politics.
Both left and right also think that more local is more "us".
A lefty Vancouverite still pays far more attention to a house fire that kills a family of five in Vancouver than they do to the same thing happening in Switzerland.
The issue of morality only comes in when one side perceives the other as having no care at all for some more distant "us" or actually having more care for the distant "us" than the local.
I guess, but you can square the circle for the materialist by the gap between # of kids people want, and the # of kids people have. Its surprisingly huge
Nicely argued for a resurgence in child-bearing, but how to incentivize it? Nothing seems to work, not in a way that scales. Family values broadly construed are really important.
Second-wave feminism in the 1970s caught boomer women entering their child-bearing years at the full flood of also entering their peak career-development years. Trying to do both is really hard. My "Greatest Generation" mother abandoned her wartime and early post-war career to raise us, then went back when we entered high school. By going back I mean she earned a degree (two, eventually) that she needed by then to re-enter her career essentially at square one. Did the hiatus blight her lifetime earnings? Absolutely. Were we worth it? She says we were.
But here's the thing. During the time we were small and our parents were trying to pay off mortgages, feed us, and find some spare money for piano lessons, there was only one income bidding up the price of those things, not two. The dirty little secret is that women's work produces less wealth for each dollar of salary than men's does. My mother was a schoolteacher. No matter the influence she had on young minds, she didn't generate the wealth that my father did making and selling things that people wanted to buy with their own money. A lot of women's work today consists of women working in government bureaucracies creating pay equity and harassment regulations that other women working in corporate HR bureaucracies document compliance with. None of this generates any wealth at all. No one would purchase this work with his own money. (Women want taxpayers and the firms to do this work on their behalf, but they won't purchase it.)
So to all the extent that women work in careers that are nice to have (social work, teaching, civil service, HR, nursing, family medicine, NGOs) they don't create wealth. Female engineers and financial experts, you're off the hook. Many are financed entirely through taxes as part of the welfare state. Yet they draw salaries....and nowadays those salaries must, by law, be equivalent to the salaries that wealth-producing men get. What this means is that women's work is inflationary. The reason it seems to take two incomes for a family to stay afloat, but it mostly didn't in the 1950s, is that women's wages drive up prices without producing as many tradeable goods. And having children while working is just really damn hard. So even if the one family is better off with both working, the society is worse off, and makes the trade-off not to have children in order to prosper seem rational.
This leads obviously to a modest proposal that, since nothing else works, working mothers need to go out of fashion if we hope to kick-start fertility. In the short-term families will be materially worse off (although day care is really really expensive, sensible only if you really love your career) but over time, there will be less money chasing the tradeable goods that men (mostly) make, and single-income prosperity will return.
Of course this is just a talking suggestion. I'm sure there are lots of holes in it.
I'd rather say that the unproductive professions you mention (and many others, beginning with anything related to studies of social issues), as well as the bureaucracy that they feed, is what it must go. Working mothers in STEM or trades are always welcome.
The seemingly underwhelming effect of economic interventions needs is counter-balanced by the fact that small differences matter (a lot). 'Sub-replacement' birthrates have dramatically different social consequences depending on how close to replacement rate it is. The US birthrate hovered around 2 for a couple decades before the great recession, which is a rate at which it would take something like 15 generations for the number of babies to half. That's a society that 'looks' much like a demographically stable one across one lifetime, and if anything has environmental benefits. Compare to something like Germany's birthrate (1.5-ish) where the same decline takes just a few generations and probably destroys the safety net without immigration. Both the cultural and technocratic questions look different from the perspective that the 'gap' is meaningfully filled by half of women having just one more child, not engineering another baby boom.
If anything, there's also a cultural question to whether we'll have faith a society can and should sustain itself (without simply replacing the population with seemingly no eye toward cultural stability) in the long run even with temporary periods of moderate population decline. The idea that populations only grow and grow and grow and otherwise will not (or should not) exist is a fairly recent one -- it just used to take a lot more to stave off rapid decline. Not allowing the population to decline even a little undercuts some obvious ways (like cheaper housing and more opportunity) that things might rebalance, but those are long-term bets because actual population decline lags fertility by decades.
I think this is a really important point. Huge policy implications for a pop that is hovering at 1.9 vs one hitting 1.2. JG
While the evidence suggests that pro-natalist policies and programs largely fail to reverse declining birth rates, appreciate your nuanced and informative discussion,.
As a new parent and talking to other parents, I have come to a new understanding of the cheap childcare laws. What is happening is Mom's no longer have any monetary excuse to stay at home with the child, no more "at least I'm saving $1000 per month". Children, from early infancy, are largely being raised in state (under) funded institutions
- I am using "Mom" in the deeply archetypical sense - dads can be "Mom"s too
- The solution isn't more funding, but letting stay at home parents get the same funding for childcare should be an option. The economics of scale should let daycare's come out ahead, and if it doesn't (e.g. 1 worker / 3 children + overhead) maybe this isn't what we should be funding
Out here in the hinterland, i feel surprised to see natalism become a big topic.
Your articles on fertility over the years have been key. This one tops them all - you don't need a great books program to include deep philosophy in your journalism :-)
For your interest, here is a Christian perspective on the same subject from "The living Church". They had a series on natality last December. https://livingchurch.org/covenant/the-ecumenical-demands-of-pro-natalism/
As a preacher, I am sad to say the old historic churches in Canada (United, Anglican) have collapsed .i.e. from millions to tens of thousands, maybe a couple thousand baptisms every year. Meanwhile the RCs are being sustained by immigrants. Old Stock Canadians and their descendants don't care for Church/corporate worship. The new style religions - the mega church- look attractive, but they don't have wide spread appeal. 2,000 may show up, but this is minuscule relative to the wider population or the time period when 20% of Canadians went to Church.
The difference is fertility. If the new style religions, small as they are, continue to attract families, than over time they will grow, as you present.
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As an aside, I am interested to seeing whether there is a connection between industrial/agricultural chemicals and fertility. I keep my eyes open for articles but see them rarely. Is this a news story waiting to happen?
> The new style religions - the mega church
You classify them as a different religion?
Well, tbf, evangelicals don't consider Roman Catholics to be Christians (just like Mormons).
The article should explain why declining population is an existential crisis. It would be, of course, if population decreased to zero, but there are positive feedbacks from a declining population: real wages increase; accessibility of health care increases; accessibility of child care increases; housing prices decrease and inflation decreases; all of which improve birth rates and general longevity.
Rapid population growth has thrown everything out of balance, and the present circumstances may reflect a natural struggle to bring back equilibrium.
The Century Initiative's predictions for a 100 million strong Canada in 2100 shows no improvement in per capita GDP vs much slower growth. The government will be able to collect more taxes, but we will have to live in a much more crowded country on land that used to feed us.
Say the population stabilizes at 30 million, where it was in 1997, just 28 years ago. Was that a worse time for Canadians, especially the youth? Not at all. Maybe we just have to live within our means.
> but there are positive feedbacks from a declining population: real wages increase; accessibility of health care increases; accessibility of child care increases; housing prices decrease and inflation decreases; all of which improve birth rates and general longevity.
That's incorrect.
It might be correct if the population declined in such a way that your age dispersal remained tilted towards youth. But it doesn't work that way. Declining population inverts your population and you get far more old people than young people. Roofers, doctors, teachers, child care workers etc... these aren't jobs for 70 year olds. but consuming health care IS something for 70 year olds.
So in the real world, a declining population means **less** accessible health care and child care... that puts strain on the social safety net and the young capable of having kids (who are less financially secure) are exposed to more economic pressure that pushes down birth rates.
The steeper the drop, the worse it is.
The reason that too few young people to support the elderly is bad for young people rather than for old people is political, not economic. We've had higher dependency ratios before without any great hardship. The only reason a high old age dependency ratio is a greater burden than a high youth dependency ratio is because old people (despite their lesser stake in the future) can vote for more handouts at any long-term cost and children can't.
People aren't likely to give up the idea someone who might not see the next election should get an equal vote, sure. But, being needed is power too. Not sure it does actually make things worse for young people if older people know they're depending on a smaller and smaller group -- even Japan is realizing it's gerontocracy is going to have to give more breaks to the young than it has been.
> The reason that too few young people to support the elderly is bad for young people rather than for old people is political, not economic.
It's both. And it's personal too. The problem of the elderly requiring radically more health care dollars than young people means that you need the young to support the old because only a vanishingly rare number of people say "Mum shouldn't get to see an oncologist to treat her cancer because that will divert health care resources from me and my kids... so she can get her suicide pill instead".
Those are real tradeoffs. Paying for better K-12 education translates to paying less for cancer treatment for 75 year olds.
Even when the social safety net isn't involved, it makes a big difference.. when aging parents have only one child, it's massively different when one or both get dementia vs. if aging parents have two children.
> We've had higher dependency ratios
When? Canada has never had the inverted age pyramid that a population decline brings because we've never had this population decline.
>When?
1970 or so. Canada never had this many elderly people, but it was more than counter-balanced by a much greater number of children. Fewer workers than dependents (young and old together) to now, with again, the difference being that it was the workers rather than the children calling the shots (so entitlements didn't get to crowd out investment the way they do now).
I think you'd be surprised at how many people other than the elderly value mostly-futile care to minorly extend the lives of the very elderly if it comes at the expense of their children. It's a frankly juvenile perspective that every new medical advancement creates a new need that *must* be filled in a decent society -- the healthcare needs of the elderly are fundamentally unlimited and they can't be allowed to crowd out every other priority.
> 1970 or so. Canada never had this many elderly people, but it was more than counter-balanced by a much greater number of children.
That's not a period with a greater dependency ratio, it's the opposite. The 1970s had precisely the opposite demographic situation we are facing today.
Ask ChatGPT to show you a population pyramid for 1970 vs. 2025 and you'll see what I mean. (Then ask it for a projection for 2040 if immigration were normalized with 2005 levels or set to zero)
The fertility rate in 1970 was 2.3 which is above replacement levels and as a result, young people and middle aged people in their prime productive years massively outnumbered old people... meaning that Canada had a far more favourable dependency/productivity ratio.
You are making up your own definition of dependency ratio. The number of old people is not what it means: it's working age (usually defined as 15-64) vs *everyone* else, old and young. This ratio was higher in 1970 (90 dependents/worker) than it's projected to be by even 2050 (about 85 dependents/worker). Having more young dependents is not inherently more favourable.
I'm well aware of what the population pyramid looked like, and also that infants were not paying for grandma's healthcare or staffing the grocery store. Maybe you can have ChatGPT tell you whether it's easier to raise the retirement age by 5 years or put fifth graders to work.
Insightful article. Well done. I have told my child disdaining brother in law many times that evolution will automatically reduce the number of people with his attitude.
Fantastic, nuanced piece, thank you. I am reminded of a conversational dynamic that happens in my home, where I get all raged up about the excesses of either political extreme, and my partner sanguinely responds, 'Don't worry so much, it's a self-limiting phenomenon.' What this piece stirs up in me is that we seem to be missing a sense of deep rooting in place, and of community/family here in Canada. Some folks have it. But it seems like maybe not enough of us. I notice a lot of people acting on beliefs like 'I've got to do everything on my own' and 'I need to get everything I can out of this situation, for me and mine'; rather than "I belong, I have something to contribute, and my neighbours have my back." I don't have kids. But I do take family and community Auntie responsibilities seriously. And it seems like there isn't a strong template for that among people I know--so that even when they desperately want help, it doesn't always occur to them that there might be others who could nurture their child.
Your best article yet. I haven’t read them all, of course, but I thank you for articulating so many thoughts and questions that have been swirling around at the edge of my awareness, but still out of reach. This dilemma of exclusively ‘material answers to spiritual questions’ feels like the defining challenge of your generation. Please continue to write on these themes.