A recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) publication formalises and quantifies what are, to most of us, a couple of readily observable facts.
The first is that women are now having fewer children. In England and Wales, those born in 1975 had on average 1.92 children, while their mothers’ generation (assumed to be born in 1949) had had 2.08. The second is that women are giving birth later in life. The 1975 cohort had averagely become mothers aged 31, unlike their own mothers, who had done it aged 22.
The report also noted that:
Half of women born in 1990 (the most recent cohort to reach age 30 years) remained childless by their 30th birthday; this is the first cohort where half remain childless by 30 years of age.
Jordan Peterson offered his take on this conundrum in an appearance on Chris Williamson’s Podcast. Peterson mentioned the difficulties people will face with such a demographic change, and I partially agree with him. Young people bring energy, change and working capacity to a society and that’s something we may come to miss in an aging population.
We all know that the ratio of pensioners to people-of-working-age is very different today than it was sixty years ago. This was brought to my attention a long time back by an anaesthetist friend, who joked that the current crop of oldies don’t have the ‘consideration’ to die – usually, of smoking-related diseases – two years after retirement like they did in the 1960s and 1970s. In a flush of venerable vigour, our antiquarians quite like to continue with the aerobics lessons and foreign travel for a further twenty or more years, during which time they can (unlike their ancestors) reasonably expect to be healthy.
Peterson goes on be actively disgusted at people who think we should limit our numbers for environmental reasons:
“This idea the planet has too many people on it… there is no sentiment more implicitly genocidal than that statement… so what do you mean too many people? … and what do you mean the planet and what do you propose to do about that? ….mass abortion… maybe we’ll just shame people out of having children.”
In this, he proposes that population and environmental concerns are “associated with a deeply-rooted existential self-hatred”, and that “a huge part of it is rooted in this existential shame and horror at the condition of being human and the fact that life is full of suffering and a lot of it is unjustified.”
I think that’s a conceptual leap, an expression of Peterson’s own preoccupations.
Does environmental-shaming people out of producing children work? In a recent YouGov survey of Britons who are not already parents, environmental concerns related to child-bearing were cited, but only by 9% of respondents. This made it just the third-largest factor.
Over a third of the childless said they plan never to have children. Of those non-parents between 35 and 44 around a quarter regarded their age as making them unsuitable. Of those between 18 and 24, 13% definitely didn’t want children, 30% said they don’t now but may be open to it in the future, and 48% definitely do want them someday.
The top two reasons for a childless life (other than ‘age’ in that older demographic) were lifestyle and cost.
In agricultural economies, children are both workers and pension plans, so it pays to have plenty of them. For example, Benjamin White‘s 1976 study of Javanese peasant families showed that by twelve to fourteen, boys were contributing around thirty-three hours per week of useful labour. Girls of nine to eleven were contributing around thirty-eight.
I don’t have to tell any parents that, in contrast, children in modern societies (as wonderful as they are) are net-detractors from the household budget. Those cited ‘lifestyle’ and ‘cost’ issues make more sense than ‘environmental concerns’. And they have regrettably become more relevant over the last twenty years. The demographic consequences of this will be with us for a long time.
Plus, those women who gave birth so young and so plentifully after World War 2 constituted a demographic ‘blip’ of their own, one that Peterson seems to have mistaken for a baseline.
Peterson’s comments imply a mechanism – that children are born because their parents have an abstract desire to have them. And in a technological society that is usually true. In reasonable places, women have access to contraception and abortion. I’ve been on marches in the UK and US for birth-control rights and was as horrified as others when Roe vs. Wade was overturned in the US last week.
But for pretty much all but the last hundred years or so, the abstract desire to have children was a small part of the story. If you had sex, chances are you’d have children. It is not that that the desire to have children never exists – it is that it is not necessary.
There are two drives necessary for reproduction: the drive to have sex, and the drive to look after young when they appear. This works for other animals. You could also add that being pro-social is vital – nobody can bring a human baby up by themselves.
As Gregory Maguire said: “What a mystery we are to ourselves”.
Because we have the capacity for self-reflection, it’s easy for us to feel we truly understand our own mechanisms, our own motives. But the development of reliable birth control and supportive social conditions has proved that, in many situations, people don’t experience the abstract desire for offspring. As Spinoza said:
Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.
The concept of free will has occupied philosophers for years. Now it is being addressed by psychologists and neuroscientists too. It’s going to be interesting.
