Planning the world with the wrong information

Apparently people aren’t having as many children as they’d like:

Millions of people are prevented from having the number of children they want by a toxic mix of economic barriers and sexism, a new UN report has warned.

Factors such as the high cost of parenthood, job insecurity, expensive housing, concerns over the state of the world and the lack of a suitable partner stop people having the families they want, rather than any desire not to have children, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said.

Hmm. That does rather run into something of a logical problem. Fertility rates are lower the richer a place is. Not by chance also where sexual equality is greater - take your choice as to the connection but we’d say the causality runs richer to less sexism. Richer places rely less on the male musculature for production, thus enabling that economic liberation of women.

From the report itself:

The research conducted for this report finds that barriers to avoiding an unintended pregnancy and barriers to starting a family are often ultimately the same: economic precarity, gender discrimination, lack of support from partners and communities, low-quality sexual and reproductive healthcare, lack of access to services like affordable childcare or education, and pessimism about the future.

We do not believe this. Precisely because those places with all of those things - free education through university, near universal childcare, vast maternity leaves and payments and so on, the near total abolition of economic precarity as a result of having had a child - are precisely those places with rock bottom fertility rates. You know, here in Europe and most especially the icy social democracies of the Scandis.

Now there is a high cost of parenthood, this is true. That cost also rises the richer a country is. But it’s the opportunity cost of having a child which has risen. In richer places there are more things that can be done with a life. That means more choices - and choice means one road taken another cannot be. The cost of having a child is all the myriad things that cannot now be done because of the presence of the child. From the trivial - not modelling bikinis a week after parturition - to the perhaps more serious - an inability to take the Hippy Trail unencumbered having parturited.

Precisely because we are richer, wholly because there are more things that can be done with a life, therefore the cost of doing any one of them has risen. Risen by exactly the number of those things that cannot now be done as a result of the decision to do one of them.

Now we’ve got the usual loons telling us how to plan and run the world without their even grasping the most simple aspects of the logical problem we actually face. Fertility rates are down because we’re richer. Not because of economic precarity but because of exactly the opposite.

The proof? Fertility rates have fallen most in those places wholly and entirely without economic precarity as a result of having had a child. QED.

Tim Worstall