By Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brookes, The Critic (Image: Pixabay)
For people to have more children, they have to be excited about having children
Why is Israel the only developed country in the world with above-replacement fertility rates whilst fertility in China, very much still a middle-income country, is among the lowest in the world? The answer, it seems, is culture.
But is such a broad answer as “culture” really satisfactory? What is it about culture that matters? It is not obvious which aspects of culture are driving changes in fertility. Some have invoked the idea that the loss of traditional values is driving fertility decline, whilst others have argued that traditional values in the modern context are actually deleterious to fertility.
Think tanker Phoebe Arslanagic-Little noted in a piece for Works In Progress that cross-country correlations are, if anything, slightly negative between European countries’ rates of people who say that there is a moral obligation to have children and the fertility rate of those countries. Further, that association goes to around zero after adding controls for the fraction of blood donors in a country, often seen as a proxy for how duty-bound a country’s citizenry really feel themselves to be.
In a new report for the Institute for Family Studies, we used survey data across over a dozen different countries to identify what kind of beliefs and attitudes really explain differences in fertility desires, fertility intentions, and children born so far across different cultures. What we found may be surprising. First, as suggested by sceptics of the idea that high birth rates require traditional values, a belief in an obligation to have children has no predictive effect on people’s likelihood of intending to have more children or, indeed, the number of children they have had so far. Correspondingly, we found that similar obligatory beliefs about what others should be doing to help parents also had limited predictive power.