The population bust

Interesting article in this weekend's NY Times Magazine on the possible causes of the developed world's demographic time bomb. It is argued there that one crucial factor is partial modernization: where women have joined the work force, but are still expected to shoulder virtually all the domestic responsibilities.

. . . a greater percentage of Dutch women than Italian women are in the work force but . . . the fertility rate in the Netherlands is significantly higher (1.73 compared to 1.33). In both countries, people tend to have traditional views about gender roles, but Italian society is considerably more conservative in this regard, and this seems to be a decisive difference. The hypothesis the sociologists set out to test was borne out by the data: women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. Put differently, Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born.

The same factors would appear to apply in Asia, as well. The other big factor, according to the article, is employment security.

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: "You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn't very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it's not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted."

Nonetheless, this isn't the whole picture. When surveys indicate that the ideal desired number of children is fairly consistent across a population, but that the actual number produced differs substantially, one can start to seek causes and propose remedies. But what about drastic shifts in the actual desire for children?

Germany and Austria are in something of a category of their own. . .

A 2002 study found that 27.8 percent of German women born in 1960 were childless, a rate far higher than in any other European country. (The rate in France, for example, was 10.7.) When European women age 18 to 34 were asked in another study to state their ideal number of children, 16.6 percent of those in Germany and 12.6 percent in Austria answered "none." (In Italy, by comparison, this figure was 3.8 percent.)

Posted by David on July 1, 2008 9:17 AM