Falling birth rates? More than just technocratic, it is a cultural question

Last week Turkey announced that it was introducing a series of incentives designed to increase the Turkish birth rate. This comes a few weeks after the Turkish President Erdoğan announced the foundation of a Populations Policy Board under the Family and Social Services Ministry. It appears that the Turks, concerned about their birth rate which fell below replacement levels in 2018, are moving to copy the sorts of programmes the Hungarian government has been experimenting with for many years.

Countries across the world are becoming increasingly aware of how much of a threat an aging population is both to the economy and to the fabric of society. Turkey is arguably one of the lucky ones since it has started to act less than a decade after its fertility rate fell below replacement. Other countries, like the United Kingdom, are only starting the discussion about crashing fertility rates after half a century of below replacement level birth rates.

Economists have long known the challenges associated with aging populations. They understand that as a society gets older there will be less workers and so less growth, while at the same time increased pension and health care costs will mean higher government expenditure – at exactly the time when the tax base of working people is shrinking. Economists know that this would be a recipe for bankruptcy and economic catastrophe but have banked on the idea that countries with aging populations can simply import more people to work and provide a tax base.

But Western countries are now starting to see how destabilising mass immigration can be. The demographer Paul Morland and I calculated that if Britain continued on with its low birth, high migration policy in order just to keep the economy ticking over at very modest rates of growth, this would mean that between 37 per cent and 54 per cent of the population would be foreign born by 2081. They are also starting to see that birth rates are crashing across the world, meaning that there may soon be no countries from which to source immigrants – especially well-educated immigrants.  

As policymakers wake up to these grim realities they are scrambling to find solutions. But they seem to be trapped in an overly technocratic mindset when they approach this problem. Technocrats are used to the idea of relatively uncomplicated solutions to policy problems. For example, they might want to raise economic growth so they will advise that the central bank lower its interest rate. Or they might want to close the budget deficit, so they will advise the government to raise income tax rates by a certain amount.

When policymakers with this mindset approach the problem of low fertility rates, they typically want to see immediate results. Take the example of Hungary. Since the second Orbán government made larger families a priority in 2010, the country has seen its fertility rate rise from 1.25 to 1.52 in 2022 – an increase of around 22 per cent. But this has given rise to a dry technocratic debate on whether this was simply part of a regional shift, with critics pointing to the 14 per cent increase in the birth rate in Romania and 10 per cent increase in Slovakia over the same period.

One can make the case that Hungary’s increase is larger than the regional average, but in truth these debates call to mind the phrase: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” That is, they are pedantic and unsuited to the issue being scrutinised. Having a family is not like taking out a mortgage or a business loan. Therefore, the effects of pro-family policies on the fertility rate will not be as obvious as the impact of lowering interest rates on the rate of credit growth. To think so is to confuse a technocratic economic question, with a deep cultural question.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the problems we have with fertility rates is due to the problems that we have with family formation. The demographer Stephen Shaw’s work shows that the main driver of low fertility rates is the decision by some people not to start families at all. Shaw finds that family size has not changed all that much in recent decades – the issue is that more and more people are not starting families. This is a deep cultural problem that will require deep cultural changes to resolve.

Does this mean that I am arguing against family policy and instead arguing that we should focus on cultural change? Not at all. Culture cannot be separated from politics and government policy. When Western countries imposed smoking bans the entire culture around smoking changed entirely. We simply cannot escape from the fact that, as the Bible has it: “The law is our teacher”.

This can be seen clearly in the statistics. While statisticians can debate endlessly what really drove the increase in the Hungarian birth rate, there is absolutely no denying that the Orbán government’s family policies have given rise to a remarkable rise in the marriage rate. Between 2010 and 2021 the marriage rate doubled. This simply cannot be explained by any regional increase. Romania saw its marriage rate rise by a mere 5 per cent over the same period and Slovakia saw it rise by 2 per cent. Hungary has now gone from having the lowest marriage rate in the European Union to having the highest rate.

The policy wonks need to put their technocratic mind aside for a moment and just contemplate what sort of a cultural change a doubling of the marriage rate might have. Having interacted with younger people on the ground in Hungary I can confirm that, unlike in many Western countries, marriage is coming to be viewed as high status and aspirational. This is unsurprising considering that the average Hungarian will now be attending twice the numbers of marriages they would have been attending before the introduction of the pro-family policies. 

The cultural changes that have led to low birth rates have been years in the making. We can trace these trends all the way back to debates that raged in the early-20th century and ‘alternative’ lifestyles that were experimented with across the Western world in the 1910s and 1920s – lifestyles that have since moved from the bohemian fringes of the upper-classes into the mainstream. These cultural changes are now deeply rooted in our societies and will take time and effort to alter. Ideally, they require a combination of economic incentives and a complete change in our media landscape. Focusing on short-term fluctuations in fertility rates is even more fruitless than trying to count the angels dancing on the head of a pin.