Michelle Goldberg thinks liberals should worry about birth rates. “Rapidly declining birth rates,” she says, “really are a problem, especially for the sort of generous welfare states that liberals love.” It’s true: I do love a generous welfare state. And the arithmetic is pretty clear on this: You can’t have a couple young people support a lot more old people into perpetuity. To invert the old Democratic saying, if you want to govern like a liberal you need someone to be breeding like a conservative.
But Goldberg doesn’t simply think liberals should worry about birth rates. She also thinks liberals shouldn’t worry about worrying about birth rates. This has traditionally been a bit of an uncomfortable topic for the Left because it gets into all sorts of questions about birth control and family structure. According to Goldberg, however, the evidence says that that’s precisely the wrong way to look at it. Women aren’t giving up the pill or leaving the workforce. Attempts to increase birth rates by making 21st Century families act like 19th Century families are doomed to failure. Rather, you have to make it easier for a 21st Century family, with all its aspirations and independence and desires, to have a big family.
I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there’s so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn’t, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones! Basically, the societies where birthrates have plunged to dangerous levels – Russia, Catholic countries like Poland, Spain and Italy, as well as Japan and Singapore – are all places that make it very difficult for women to combine work and family. In countries that support working mothers, like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France, birthrates are basically fine – they’re either just at replacement, or shrinking in a very slow, totally manageable way. (The United States is the exception, for a whole host of reasons – some intuitive and some surprising – that I’ll elaborate some other time.) That’s why the Tory MP David Willetts, in a very smart 2003 report on the threat low birthrates pose to Europe’s pension systems, wrote that “feminism is the new natalism.” As he explained:
The evidence from Italy, and indeed Spain, is that a traditional family structure now leads to very low birth rates…[a] brief tour of birth rates in four European countries helps demonstrate what modern family policy must be about. It has nothing to do with enforcing traditional roles on women…In most of Europe women still aspire to having two children but in Italy and Germany it is very difficult to combine this with women’s other aspirations.In other words, the threat of population decline is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies. It’s a discussion we should welcome.
Full post here. And “here,” incidentally, directs you to Tapped, where Michelle is now a contributor. Welcome!