Recently, Mises Senior Faculty member, Tom Woods, has spoken with Kevin Dolan—the founder of the Natal Conference. This eclectic gathering provided an opportunity for those concerned about falling fertility rates across the globe to discuss the nature, causes, and consequences of this reality.
Economist and author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, Catherine Pakaluk, delivered an address entitled, “Pronatalists, Antinatalists: We’re All Malthusians Now.” In it, she made the insightful observation that both anti-natalists and pro-natalists fall into an overly simplistic understanding of fertility choice. In short, each policy position relies on an “more resources into households—more babies out” view of natality. She regards those who hold this view as “default natalists” who hold the view that to maximize children we should maximize household resources. Ironically, one of the leftist critiques of the Natal Conference from the Jacobin goaded attendees that if they really wanted more babies on the planet, then they would advocate for the expansion of the welfare state! Indeed, South Korea and Hungary have done just that, and have very little to show for it.
However, this assumption about child-bearing provides a deterministic view of human behavior that denies deliberate action. Pakaluk recognizes that child-bearing should be viewed as a form of human action. She notes that,
Wherever people can get their hands on the means to reduce births today they seem to do so. Adopting the notion that people fundamentally want to have children forces us into a kind of nonsense position that the freest, wealthiest, most reproductively enabled people in history has not been able to act on their biological inclination to have children. If having kids is an instinct or a constant inclination of the human animal we are surely the least functional species on the planet.
She continues,
…it’s vastly more sensible to conclude that having children is an act and a habit for individuals and societies. It’s a mode of human excellence governed by the classical account of human action, the rational part of the rational animal. People choose to do a thing because they want its object perceived to them as good.
A Misesian statement if there ever was one!
She further develops the logic of human choice in child bearing, reminding her listeners that:
First, people are rational choosers…revealed [or demonstrated] preference is the most important indicator of what people want and need and how they assess the relative value of things. The [perceived] utility of children has collapsed…the opportunity costs have risen.
This state of affairs has led to a collapse in the demand for children in all parts of the world, even in allegedly “pro-natalist” regimes.
Finally, she encourages those concerned about the consequences of fertility collapses that, “What currently today and reliably overcomes this calculus is a personal conviction that children are desirable—wantable for their own sakes.”
Pakaluk’s statement seems to channel Joseph Schumpeter. He foresaw that this attitude would prevail in his 1942 Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. He predicted that, “as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting—they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions.”
But what are these modern conditions that Schumpeter refers to? For Pakaluk’s part, she points to the decline in preferred family size that began in the late 1960s. Some readers may think it’s the sexual revolution that drove this new set of preferences. Instead, she upholds the importance at that time of a key technology shock, namely, birth control.
Here, it’s vital to recall that technological advancements come from the human mind. This fact raises the question: What conditions would cause both women and men to accept and adopt multiple forms of birth control, from prophylactics, the Pill, and abortion? The use of contraception is an attempt to lower the long-run costs of sexual action and to maximize the short-term benefits—plain and simple. So, what is it that drives shorter-run thinking? High time preference rates. Put even more simply, technological advances don’t come from nowhere. They emerge from human actors who believe that the use of certain means create a preferable state of affairs, given the general conditions of life that surround them—including the prevailing culture.
Moreover, it is the inflation culture which drives shorter time horizons. In such a culture, this technological development of modern contraception is eminently rational. Child-bearing and -rearing is a deliberate choice, and natality requires longer time horizons and lower time preferences. Such a disposition is less likely to prevail in the inflation culture.
It is the inflation-racked human who looks for and prefers short-term consumption and pleasure. And people swept up in the inflation culture will tend to disregard long-term commitments—the very thing that children require. In the fall of 2023, Guido Hülsmann summed up the inflation culture man succinctly, as “materialist, shortsighted, reductionist, shallow and servile.” These characteristics—when adopted by an entire culture—are certainly less likely to purposefully choose to invest in the long-run care and investment that children need.
Thankfully, Pakaluk has dissuaded her audience from the Malthusian theory of inputs in, children out. Her emphasis on the technology shock of birth control that led to a decline in the demand for children is clear, cogent, and accurate. However, it’s the inflation culture that leads to the uplift of short-termism, and down-grading of the long run, and ultimately to a form of rationality that gives rise to technologies that demonstrate that people throughout the planet have devalued children in light of the other alternatives available to them.
