Family Policy is Steaming Toward A Demographic Iceberg, Part II

How to Turn the Ship

Note: I’m excited to celebrate the launch of my friend Isabelle Hau’s new book, Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education. Isabelle makes a powerful case for the need to put relationships at the center of our care and education conversations–and how we might do that–writing that “as parents, caregivers, educators, policymakers, and citizens, we have a responsibility to…ensure that young children are given the opportunity to experience nurturing and enriching relationships that will positive impact their lives for the long term.” I couldn’t agree more; be sure to give Love to Learn a look!

In Part I of this series, I explored why demographic change (aging/longer-lived populations + smaller birth cohorts) draws relatively little attention from the ideological left despite the fact it represents a hugely consequential new context. In this part, I want to talk about how progressives might respond in ways that actually advance their vision for a better society.

Where to From Here?

Here’s the rest of Ezra Klein’s quote that I mentioned in Part I:

I wish that worry over falling global fertility was not quite so right-wing-coded. I agree there is something troubling about countries that have ceased to reproduce themselves. There is tragedy in how many people don’t end up having the families they desire. The number of children American women say they want has barely budged over the decades, but as marriage rates decline and childbearing is pushed into later years, the number of children women actually have has fallen. This is not just some quirk of American culture. We are seeing it all over the world.

There are ideas in Klein’s column and other works I’ve read that lead me to the following propositions:

1. Demographic change threatens nearly every societal goal that progressives hold; addressing it is imperative if we are to continue to strive for objectives ranging from universal child care to good public education to a strong social safety net.

2. Individuals and couples should be able to have the family size they desire: the gap between preferred and realized family size is both a moral and societal problem that deserves attention and action.

3. There are opportunities to engage with the birth rate conversation in ways that use it to promote a fairer and more flourishing society.

Together, these propositions form the basis for what I might call a family freedom agenda.

I’m not going to spend a whole lot of new time on #1, because I’ve already written an essay about it. If you’ll allow me to quote myself:

How is a low-birth future bad for the nation and the world? Let me count (just some of) the likely ways:

• It could do huge damage to the pay-ahead concept behind social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, potentially necessitating tax increases or eligibility changes.

• It could cause a major economic slowdown and decline of entrepreneurship and innovation, with ripples across the entire population and world economy.

• It could substantially reduce the cohort size of school-age children, sending public education into a fiscal crisis since fixed costs remain high and most U.S. education spending is allocated on a per-pupil basis; higher education could see similar impacts.

• It could put tremendous strain on maintaining infrastructure, such as roads and water systems, as jurisdictions contend with high fixed costs amid significantly shrunken tax bases.

• It could require a reallocation of social spending to be more heavily skewed towards elder care, leaving less for child care, antipoverty efforts, climate change-related projects, and so on.

• It could shift the electorate into even more of a “gerontocracy,” in which voters over 65 have greater power in voting numbers than younger voters (before taking into account different age-band voting rates).

We’re already on the leading edge of these changes, with cities like Chicago having to allocate over $1 of every $5 they collect just to cover pension obligations, states like Colorado (despite a healthy economy and net population inflow) struggling with a budget deficit largely as a result of state Medicaid spending on an aging population, and school systems and colleges across the country facing fiscal crises and service closures in the face of smaller birth cohorts.

Having Many Children Shouldn’t Be a Luxury Good

When it comes to #2, focusing on the gap between desired and realized family size sidesteps the problematic discussions around abortion or “convincing” childless women to have babies, and instead zooms in on freedom and self-determination. What kind of country is it when having multiple children becomes a luxury good reserved for the rich–which is exactly what’s starting to happen? When someone’s ability to have the number of children they want is constrained not by the lack of a partner or a biological struggle to conceive, but by cultural and policy forces that are holding them back? (By the by, simply closing this gap would also do wonders for stabilizing population projections.)

However, there is an asterisk here. The writer Stephanie H. Murray recently offered an important nuance: this case only takes you so far, because what happens if or when the average desired family size drops well below population “replacement rate”?¹ In her essay, Are We Willing to Admit We Need Parents?, Murray posits:

This is a difficult position to trace out because, in a sense, I agree that people having fewer kids than they’d like is indeed a problem. Is it the problem, though? By that logic, if desired fertility fell to zero tomorrow, and people ceased having kids altogether, then all would be well, which is silly.

Murray is, of course, correct in the thought-experiment way. But she also challenges the focus on the desire/actual gap on deeper grounds, calling it an “understandable but, in my view, ultimately counterproductive hesitation to admit that the real reason we’re having this discussion is not that individuals need kids, but that society does.”

There is something to what Murray is getting at–we would do well to remember that children are both individual treasures and, as feminist economist Nancy Folbre put it back in 1994, “public goods”–but this is to my eyes also a rather slippery slope toward more coercive policies and practices as I talked about in Part I (to be very clear, this is not what Murray is calling for; I’m speaking of where I see the society-needs-kids-but-we-don’t-have-enough logic ending). For my part, I think we should first do everything reasonable to close the desired family size gap, and in doing so, we may well put policy, social, and cultural bolsters in place that keep the bottom of desired family size from falling out.

After all, there are plenty of times when fixing the infrastructure of one problem serves to alleviate related problems. It’s not a perfect analogy, but consider for instance efforts to fight various waterborne diseases in many African countries. Installing water filtration systems and otherwise helping people achieve clean drinking water not only severely reduced cases of Guinea worm and cholera, it has also become an enabling condition for broader community and economic development. In our discussion, one can easily see why the same efforts that work to close the gap around family size preference may serve to stabilize or indeed increase those preferences.

There’s an Opportunity in the Change

Which leads us to #3: There is an opportunity here. Responding to demographic change is going to require rethinking care delivery and rebuilding the ties that bind communities together. With many more Baby Boomer seniors, and many more people in Gens Z and Alpha who will be aging without biological children, now is the time to consider how to co-locate child and elder care services, create physical and social environments that promote neighborliness, and so on. Rapidly increasing care needs may also generate an opening for explicit cultural change efforts around how care is positioned in terms of the role of the family and the role of society. Similarly, there are policy implications: if we want to close that gap between desired and realized family size, we know that items like the presence of affordable housing play a big role in family formation.

Or take child care. While I am certainly worried that pressure from elder care and social insurance programs will create a difficult fiscal environment for new government investments in children, there is a credible argument that as the dependency ratio (the ratio of working-age adults to children & seniors) shifts, America is going to need more mothers in the workforce. And we’re going to need them sooner rather than later. My colleague, the labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, has offered that:

In effect, the [presence of the Baby Boomers] enabled policymakers to coast on policy related to labor for many years. That time is clearly over, as the recent rebound in participation rates isn’t enough to make up for the surge in retirement from a major demographic group. We need more workers...The historic labor force highs prime-age women notched last year do not portend rosy days ahead or reflect thoughtful, crafted labor force policy. The boomers will continue to leave (the youngest turn 61 this year). Policymakers have in hand clear lessons-of how to counter their exit, but are not pursuing it. What’s lost from their inaction is a windfall for the economy.

How often, though, have you heard the case for universal child care made on the grounds of demographic change?² Interestingly, demographic concerns have been the driving force behind some other nations’ child care reforms. For instance, Japan is moving in the direction of a universally free child care system, with Tokyo recently beginning to offer exactly that. When the governor of Tokyo announced the move, she explicitly tied it to demographics: “Japan is facing the crisis of a declining number of children, which isn’t going away. There is no time to spare.”³

Not the usual child care headline! (preschoolers here = all children below school-age)

Conclusion

My point in all of this is that those of us on the left are letting an important pitch sail by if we ignore demographic change because of old ideas around overpopulation or disgust over crappy conservative framing. Whether you take a threat mitigation view or an opportunistic view, demographic change is happening: 10,000 Americans reach retirement age every day, while around 650,000 fewer babies are being born in the U.S. each year as compared to 2007.⁴ We can choose to either be shaped by what happens next or choose to proactively start shaping our new reality. I would encourage each of us–regardless of our political ideology–to act accordingly.

1. Let’s add “replacement rate” to the Terrible Demographic Language Hall of Fame, by the way!

2. To be clear, I think the strongest positioning for child care is that it should be a universal right due to its status as a social good with incredibly positive ripple effects beyond the directly served individuals, and I worry about over-using the economic case; but my point here is, demographics provide a whole new angle of approach.

3. For context, the Tokyo metropolitan region has a population of 14 million, which would make it the fifth-largest U.S. state and would be the equivalent of Pennsylvania making child care free for all residents.

4. Immigration of course complicates the equation and is tremendously important; immigrants are projected to account for the overwhelming majority of America’s aggregate population growth in coming decades. But it’s worth noting that immigration is not a sustainable long-term solution: even young, relatively high-birth countries like those in Sub-Saharan Africa are seeing plummeting birth rates, nor are there enough potential immigrants to continually stabilize populations across the vast number of depopulating countries.