Pronatalism won’t work but the far right loves it anyway

Elon Musk was beating the drum of pronatalism long before he became Donald Trump’s biggest supporter. And although Trump has yet to publicly embrace the billionaires’ favorite social cause, the ideologues of his movement surely have. Around the world, hard-right politicians are increasingly turning to pronatalism as the vehicle for their culture war messaging.

Tech bros might seem like strange bedfellows for those fixated on boosting marriage rates in decades past. But the two groups have converged on the urgent need to increase birth rates. Both demands are more tuned toward undermining modern family change than they are toward social policy.

Unfortunately, many liberals are also enticed by the idea that “population collapse” is an imminent threat. Even if they prefer policies that happen to make life better — family leave, childcare, education, housing and healthcare — than the barefoot and pregnant version of pronatalism, both approaches distract from another political problem we have to solve now: immigration.

If you expect people worried about fertility decline in wealthy societies to clamor for more immigrants to prop up our aging populations, you aren’t tracking actual right-wing politics, which has always been more concerned about restoring historical gender regimes and protecting their vision of European culture than addressing the contemporary structural challenges of modern society. That’s why they stoke unfounded fears of population “replacement” when — as it always has before — immigration is poised to elevate the nation’s economic and social prospects.

The hard policy reality is that raising birth rates enough to alleviate the problems of population aging and eventual decline is impossible on the time scale required. Our pension systems will not survive the decades it would take — and the trillions of dollars it would cost — for more babies to become the workers we need.

In demography, the future is already here. No policy can increase the number of babies born yesterday.

This lesson is hard for some students of 20th century history to grasp. When the world faced explosive population growth, the international development establishment mounted a successful program to reduce global birth rates for the common good. Now that birth rates are considered too low in many societies, and still falling, why can’t we turn this ship around and get birth rates back up at least to the “replacement” level of two births per woman?

The reason is that reduced birth rates swam with the tide of history. Everything about modern society pushed in the direction of fewer children, culturally and economically. Reversing that tide is not just difficult — it’s impossible. You can’t go back. We may someday achieve a global regime of sustainable birth rates, but that will be part of a new social order yet to be invented.

In the decades after World War II, the United Nations and leading governments embarked on a global effort to reduce population growth, eventually adopting an agenda that went beyond contraception to expanding educational opportunities and providing better healthcare. Greater access to contraception and women’s empowerment both played a role in driving down birth rates, and the effort was ultimately successful.

Trying to lower birth rates in a society with very high fertility and rampant poverty was, if not easy, at least straightforward. New opportunities — better education and jobs — improved the quality of life for women and their children. Access to contraception gave them more power to affect important changes in their own lives.

Rapidly declining birth rates created a “demographic dividend,” as the number of adult workers mushroomed relative to the number of new mouths to feed. The interests of families and society were aligned — the policies pushed by global elites happened to coincide with the well-being of the people affected. Birth rates fell, and the people having fewer children prospered as a result.

We must not forget the horrific human rights abuses that came with these policies in many places, such as China. But there can be no doubt that women in many countries wanted fewer children, and that their families and societies benefited from that result.

Now the global total fertility rate — the number of babies the average woman is expected to have in her lifetime — has fallen to 2.3. This shows every sign of continuing to slide, with almost all regions except Sub-Saharan Africa already below the level required to maintain population size (absent immigration). Inevitably, then, the global population will eventually start to decline.

Why can’t we reverse this, now that birth rates are worryingly low and continuing to fall? Unlike reducing birth rates, raising them requires convincing people to change their lifestyles and goals in ways that will not benefit them economically, and will produce societal benefits only after a generation or more. Even if policy were to achieve higher birth rates, rather than reaping a demographic dividend, society would be saddled with the costs of raising a larger generation of children to adulthood before any economic benefits from their labor would be realized.

The Urban Institute estimates that U.S. governments (at all levels) spend an average of $17,660 per child per year. At that rate, if we somehow devised a policy to increase birth rates for one year by 10 percent, it would cost some $115 billion to raise those 360,000 additional children up to age 18.

That’s before we start spending on the higher education needed to make them highly productive workers — and does not even include whatever spending the fertility-promoting policy itself requires. And it’s just one year of extra babies, who won’t be available to take care of their grandparents for a quarter century or more.

Reducing birth rates in poor countries was swimming with the stream of history, and the results paid for themselves. Increasing birth rates in today’s low-fertility societies is an against-the-stream proposition, requiring vast investments upfront, and promising only distant fiscal rewards. The history of population policy, therefore, is not as encouraging as the pronatalists would have us believe.

Along with the liberal pronatalists, I am all in favor of providing today’s parents, and potential parents, with all the social welfare spending largesse they can carry. But I don’t expect such policies will pay for themselves with new workers.

There is no case of a country falling to low fertility (below 1.5 births per woman) and then rising back to replacement levels. It has never happened. Any suggestion we can accomplish that goal remains speculative.

Rather than hoping to boost birth rates in the short or medium run, the wiser policy is to provide the resources necessary for people to have the families they desire, shift the resources necessary to support older populations and permit the freer movement of our fellow humans who seek immigration — for their benefit and for our own.

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland.