Wolfgang Lutz
Subject: Persuading Younger Women to Have More Children
Bio: Professor of Demographics at the University of Vienna
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Persuading Younger Women to Have More Children. Our speaker is Wolfgang Lutz who is a professor of demographics at the University of Vienna.
I want to learn about the rapid decline in fertility and what it means for the world. Wolfgang, let’s start with why should we study demographics?
Wolfgang Lutz:
I decided to focus on demography as a young man. In 1972, when the Club of Rome published the Limits to Growth and used computer models to draw scenarios about the future of humanity. What are the environmental limitations? Their key role in the whole picture was played by population trends. I thought that this is the challenge of the future.
Larry Bernstein:
The Limits of Growth was Malthusian and made predictions that human population would quickly overextend the resources of the world and cause its destruction. Paul Ehrlich was another supporter of this view. It seems that the science of demography has reversed course and we're now more concerned about a lack of people than a surplus.
Wolfgang Lutz:
I went on to study at the University of Pennsylvania to get a training in demography. In the early 1980s, there was this big discussion between the Malthusians, Paul Ehrlich wrote a book entitled The Population Bomb, and the other side was an economist, Julian Simon, who had written a book, The Ultimate Resource. He said there could never be too many people because with the number of people there is also a genius who will solve the problem. They came to completely opposite conclusions. Because of this, my first independent research project was to do a case study of what I call a microcosmos.
The island of Mauritius, you can clearly define what is homemade and what is imported. I developed a computer model of population, development, and the environment on the island of Mauritius to try to understand up to what point are the assumptions made by Ehrlich and by Julian Simon still compatible and where do they depart from each other? This was a decisive insight that has determined my further research.
The real difference is whether you consider the education of the people. Huge numbers of uneducated, illiterate people have problems. They will not be able to use technologies and feed themselves. Julian Simon was right, that if you educate, people can come up with inventions, they can solve problems. It's the skills that matter. And that then led me to do the demography of education and human capital formation.
Larry Bernstein:
Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon entered into a bet that the price of certain metals and other commodities would decline over a 10-year period. The basis of his argument was Paul Ehrlich’s assumption that with more people demanding more commodities and therefore prices would surge. Simon said that man would find substitutions or become more productive. What happened?
Wolfgang Lutz:
In this particular bet, it turned out that Julian Simon was right, but still this didn't take the wind out of the sails of people who were seeing doomsday. Let me come back to this to study on the island of Mauritius in the 1960s Mauritius was used as a textbook case of a country a trapped in the vicious circle of very high population growth one of the highest in the world.
Extreme poverty -- depended on only one commodity sugar cane. British scientists visiting the island, said that the only thing that can help Mauritius is to invest in human capital and education. It's a small island with a functioning parliament, they came to the conclusion that we need to simultaneously educate everybody and introduce family planning. Mauritius had what was at the time the fastest fertility decline in human history. Mauritius saw the birth rate from an average of six children per woman go down to three children per woman, and then subsequently lower. Today it is as low as the fertility rate in European countries.
The reality surpassed the most optimistic scenarios we developed in the 1980s. It is the most highly developed country in Africa despite of the fact that it was an example of the poverty trap decades ago.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about the relationship between educating women and family formation.
Wolfgang Lutz:
The famous American demographer, Ansley Coale, who is father of the Center of Population Research at Princeton, once succinctly summarized the three necessary preconditions for a lasting fertility decline. The first was fertility must be within the calculus of conscious choice. You move from a fatalistic attitude to a more planning attitude and that transition is very closely linked to becoming literate and having this ability for more abstract thinking.
The other two preconditions are that it is advantageous to have fewer children, and there must be acceptable means of birth control. And you see almost universally during the process of demographic transition that the more educated women want fewer children and manage to have fewer children.
Larry Bernstein:
Take the United States, we've seen a dramatic decline in total fertility rate, but over the last 40 years, we've seen almost no change in education attainment. In fact, test scores have been falling in the United States. Total fertility rate is collapsing across the educational attainment spectrum. Our least educated and most educated are all experiencing declines in total fertility. What's going on?
Wolfgang Lutz :
I just tried to explain the process of demographic transition, when you go from a regime of uncontrolled, largely fatalistic childbearing to a controlled one. When you talk about societies that are already in the end of the demographic transition with fertility rates very low, you see other forces being dominant.
Until about 20 years ago, the fertility rate in the U.S. was quite a bit higher than most European countries. The reason was social heterogeneity. It was higher mostly because of teenage pregnancies in urban subpopulations. If you look at the fertility rates above the age of 20, the American pattern was not so different from the European pattern.
The recent decline has partly been due to a much desired decline in teenage pregnancies in the U.S.
Over the last 15 years, some of the high fertility countries in Scandinavia has recently declined significantly. We don't understand the reasons yet. Some people have argued that it's related to the excessive use of social media changing the social structure of these countries, not so much has changed over the last 15 years, but fertility rates really went down rapidly.
With respect to education, you see a U-shape. You still have the low educated unplanned pregnancies. Then the lowest fertility is for the lower middle class. The more highly educated manage to better combine work and family life. Since the desired family size around two children in most European countries, the more educated women manage to organize their lives that they come closer to this ideal of two children.
This may in the future be a pattern where the most educated have a little higher fertility than the intermediate educated women. How can we explain this? Education helps you to reach your goals more effectively and that also relates to the number of children. It's not surprising that educated men and women, if they want to have more children actually have more children than the average.
Larry Bernstein:
You were mentioning a sociological argument that you observe your peers through social media and want to behave consistent with your friends in terms of number of children. To list some, religiosity, the religion. what is socially desirable, and what your friends are doing. You mentioned teenage pregnancies is a problem. Well, in some schools in the United States, particularly in urban cities where teenage pregnancy is tolerated or encouraged by peers, you see very high teen pregnancies. And in other communities where it's considered inappropriate, it's very low in high educated, rich communities.
Wolfgang Lutz:
This will probably be the determining factor in the future of fertility. There is indeed very strong social influence on what you consider as ideal family size. To what degree does having one, two or three children belong to the most important things that you want to achieve in your life? This has been studied extensively for religious groups. There are these several examples of highly educated women who are ultra-orthodox Jews and have 8 or more children for religious reasons. You also have in Scandinavia the Laestadians that have 10 children.
Even though the women work full time out of the house and the government pays for babysitters to look after these large numbers because they don't use contraception for religious reasons. There are these often rather small groups.
In the average population, how does the ideal family size change? I've written about the low fertility trap hypothesis that once the ideal family size at the societal level falls to levels below two, then it is very difficult for governments to influence fertility and have an increase.
Fertility in China now has declined to almost 1.0, much lower than what we have in Europe.
Larry Bernstein:
The implications of having a 1.0 total fertility rate would suggest that each generation would create half the number of people as the previous generation.
Wolfgang Lutz:
Correct. It's a very significant decline. South Korea still has a lower fertility rate of 0.7, which is extremely low. Demographers never thought this is possible, but this huge country of China where you still have the tail of the one child policy. Now they got what the government wanted 30 years ago. They have a one child population, but the government now understands that this is too low and they want to increase it, but it'll be very difficult if not impossible. 80% of the women in Shanghai said that they consider one child as their ideal. They don't want to have two or more children.
And when you then ask why don't you want more? They come up with reasons. Children don't fight with each other if it's only one. And when it comes to inheritance, it's much easier. Interestingly, in Europe we still have a two-child ideal. And when we ask women, why do you want two children that you can nicely play with each other. And so, whatever your mindset is, you come up with different arguments supporting this.
Larry Bernstein:
South Korea is now 0.7 total fertility rate. A TFR of 1, it's a 50% decline population per generation. But if it's 0.7, it's a 65% decline in the population. And that quickly takes you down quite rapidly. South Korea did not have the one child policy but China did. And yet its numbers are lower. You have an experiment of China versus its other East Asian peers. And it doesn't appear that when you look at the data across countries that it's doing particularly worse than others. Are we placing too much emphasis on that one child policy relative to some other factors that may explain what's going on?
Wolfgang Lutz:
I tend to agree that the Chinese fertility would've declined almost with the same speed if there would not have been any strong government policy for one child, and we've seen this in South Korea. In Korea now, young women are expected to stay home and drop out of work if they have a child. Now, with Korean women being highly educated these days, they have a choice. They either go for a career of their own, which means not marrying, not having children, or they will choose to have a family and marry, but then they will be locked into their home. And not surprisingly, an increasing number of Koreans opts for the first option to have their own career at least postponing child.
Larry Bernstein:
On the podcast, I had Betsy Stevenson speak about deferring childbirth. She said that women that invest in their careers and graduate degrees are just delaying their childbirth. Do you think the collapse in total fertility relates to this deferment and the total fertility rate will kick back up as they get older?
Wolfgang Lutz:
There is something that we call the tempo effect in childbearing. The total fertility rate as we measure it, it just sums up the age specific fertility rates as observed in one calendar year. If you really want to measure the fertility of a lifetime of a woman, you have to wait down until this cohort of women is 50. And people don't want to wait so long. So, they use this period indicator, which is sensitive to changes in the timing of birth.
Let's assume that like 10% of the women decide to have their child not this year but next year but still have the same number of children over their life course. The total fertility rate will fall by 10% because this birth will not be born in that calendar year. And you can measure this with the mean age of child-bearing. So even a small increase in the mean age of childbearing means a downward bias of the total of fertility rate.
And that is also tricky in observing the impact of policies on fertility. The Hungarian government claimed that they've increased the total fertility rate by 0.3 children due to their new family friendly measures. But if you look at this tempo adjusted fertility rates where you try to iron out this distortion, there actually is no change in the actual number of children over the life course.
Larry Bernstein:
Do you think that women who are getting more educated are just deferring births or not?
Wolfgang Lutz:
It remains to be seen. What we know from the past that some of them managed to recuperate the birth rates. Women 35 to 40 have been on the increase but not enough to fully make up for the lower birth rates at young ages.
Larry Bernstein:
Let's talk about technology and fertility. The pill obviously was a revolution in women's choices of childbirth. I find surprising the pill was introduced in the early 1960s but the collapse in total fertility doesn't happen until much later. How do you explain that?
Wolfgang Lutz:
There is a group of scholars who talk about contraception driven demographic transition, particularly with a focus on Africa, that says if you provide more or easier access to contraceptives that will by itself bring down birth rates. The demographic transition in Europe and in the U.S. happened without any modern contraception. The birth rates in Central Europe declined to below two in the 1920s not even condoms played a significant role. It is more convenient to use the pill but it is clearly not the main driving force behind the fertility decline.
Larry Bernstein:
If the female has children when she's 18, and the total fertility rate is two, there'll be two newborns, there'll be a husband and wife, so there'll be two at 18, there'll be two at 36, there'll be two at 54, there'll be two at 72, and then if we snapped our fingers and said that they're going to be having children at 36 and not 18. As we transition towards that, there's two at 36, there's two at 72. That is a substantial diminution in the total population, and the cohorts look completely different by working age. We have seen delay in childbirth, and that significantly affects the cohort distributions by age. Tell us what that means.
Wolfgang Lutz:
You mentioned a very important point. The age of childbearing is very influential. This lengths of years between generations. And it has been proposed to enhance the birth rate, to not ask women to have more children over their lifetime but have them earlier that would have a very significant impact.
There is a very interesting natural experiment comparing East and West Germany in the 1970s. In East Germany, the socialist government came up with a policy that every woman as soon as she became pregnant, had the entitlement to government supported housing. This caused many female students at age 18 became pregnant to get housing, which was otherwise almost impossible to achieve. And they only had one child.
After the collapse of the East German government and the reunification in the nineties, we still had for some time this very distinct childbearing patterns where in East Germany most women had a child early on in their life even though they didn't get free housing anymore. But they kept this habit whereas in West Germany, it was much later childbearing. It was a very different reproductive pattern, which was influenced by this policy of Eastern Germans in the 1970s.
Larry Bernstein:
We focused on parents but not grandparents. If you start very young in childbirth, the grandparents are also very young and will benefit to the joy of having grandchildren for most of their lives and potentially enjoy great-grandchildren. If you do get this deferral, being a grandparent will be a very short-term affair. What do you make of that decision as it relates to total joy over a lifetime of children and grandchildren?
Wolfgang Lutz :
That's an important point. We happen to live with the same house with our grandchildren and these six and 8-year-old boys’ structure our day. It’s a joy to be with the grandchildren, but as you've said, this changing age childbirth matters in conjunction with the increasing female labor force participation rate. If the grandchildren are around at the time when the women are still in their working ages, the grandmothers duty is looking after the children. This is an issue for many couples these days that they cannot rely on still working grandparents. When the generational lengths becomes longer, then there's a higher probability that the grandparents will already be retired and have more time to look after their grandchildren.
Larry Bernstein:
During the Biden administration, there are estimates that 10 million immigrants entered the United States and those generally are young people often without children. But they'll have children soon, say two, now you have a total of 20 million in the United States. If you're a citizen, you can also have family reunification. And so, immigrants will be able to bring their parents. What starts out as 10 million, if you had children and you brought your parents, you could bring it to 30 million. How do you think about immigration flows as it affects total population in a community?
Wolfgang Lutz:
And that's a factor in many countries like here in Austria and Germany. We are also discussing the consequences of this big inflow in 2015 where lots of Syrian and Iraqi refugees came and they were now allowed to bring their families along. Family reunification has been the main reason for strong immigration. We see schools flooded with children who don't speak any German. And that is a challenge for the education system and for social integration.
In demographic terms, it diminishes the age dependency ratios in the medium run. In the short run, you have a higher youth dependency ratio. These immigrants will be added to the labor force and if they become skilled and productive, they will positively contribute to economic development.
Education weighted labor force dependency ratio is improving if you have immigration of more highly skilled people who start to work soon and are well integrated into the society. But it depends who are the migrants. We've seen in Italy as an example where a large number of migrants came in, but they have very low education, and they don't integrate well into the formal labor market. Their immigration turned out to be a burden for the social system, and the economy depends on who the migrants are, how well skilled they are, and how quickly they integrate into society.
Larry Bernstein:
We talked about the technology of the pill, but it's also possible technology might make childbirth easier or later in life. Do you think technology could radically change long-term fertility?
Wolfgang Lutz:
It's pure speculation. Up to this point that there has not been much progress. Probably the easiest would be to encourage women to have their children earlier. If they have their children during student time, they're probably more flexible. And then when they commit to their career, the children are already going to school. But this is so much against the trend for youngsters to first live out their life and not have stable relationships from the beginning.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each podcast on a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to demographics and fertility?
Wolfgang Lutz:
We see the end of world population growth on the horizon. World population will probably not exceed 10 billion. The population is getting rapidly more educated. Both these trends are helpful with the daunting challenge of global climate change. People who are empowered by education will be much more able to adapt to unavoidable climate change. An end to population growth will also make both the mitigation and the adaptation of climate change easier.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Wolfgang for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Polarized America during the American Revolution. Our speaker was H.W. Brands who is a Professor of History at University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of the book Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution.
We discussed that our politics have been very disagreeable since the beginning. And if you think that the politics are polarized now, imagine what it was like during the American revolution, when the losers really did have to move to Canada.
I would now like to make a plug for next week’s podcast. The topic will be the Future of Vaccinations. Our speaker will be my good friend Ofer Levy who is a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Precision Vaccines at Boston Children’s Hospital.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Polarized America during the American Revolution, here.
