The Impotence of Public Policy to Solve Problems... like The Birth Dearth

In part one I look at how little birth rates increase, even with the best government programs

Introduction

I often say that lawyers have never seen a law they don’t like, in fact the worse the law, the more lawyers are required to navigate it. For them law good or bad is a win. Likewise, those that sit in the seats of all of the houses of parliament around Australia are there with a belief that public policy is a powerful change agent. Whenever there is a problem in this country, their is a limited menu of government solutions that will always be advocated: a call to pass a new or better law, a new or better government program or simply to throw money at it.

We have seen this recently with the Prime Minister acquiescing to the demands of activists protesting the prevalence of domestic violence. But there are many problems created by these laws, programs and handouts that are never looked at. After all, there are no solutions only trade-offs. Once a law, program or handout is enacted the lawmakers consider the problem solved until the same problem rears its head again and suddenly the initial law, program or handout was insufficient and needs reform to give it more teeth in order to fix the problem once and for all. This is a viscous cycle that plays out in all levels of government and leaves us with more laws than even I, a lawyer, can get my head around.

In this piece I look at a number of issues that government has tried to solve but failed because it is fundamentally impotent in some areas. No amount of incentives and handouts can induce people to do something or not do something if they are simply incapable of because the preconditions are not present to begin with.

Issue I: Population Collapse

One of the issues growing in prominence right now is population collapse, with many, particularly in conservative political spaces, sounding the alarm that in pretty much every western country, and a lot of non-western countries, birth rates are below replacement rate. This is a problem that there isn’t much any government can do about it. The best attempt has been Hungary who has incentivised birth rates by granting couples that have 4 or more children lifetime exemptions from income tax, but even that only moved the needle a little bit.

Australia has tried various initiatives most prominently the Howard era Baby Bonus (a “chuck money at it” solution) which also didn’t arrest the trend.

Now, there is a lot to be said with at least not penalising people who do start families, and organising the tax system to enable this (such as by allowing income splitting that only those savvy enough to set up trusts take advantage of at present) but this will only help people who do start families, not help people to start them in the first place which is the real problem - and one the government can’t really solve (only mask over with immigration rates).

The reason birth rates are low is because childlessness is on the rise. Unless people are finding each other, forming committed partnerships and starting a family within the women’s fertile window then no amount of public policy is going to change this. This is a cultural problem.

It doesn’t help that this cultural problem is a public-private partnership where corporate employers are incentiviesed (including by paying for women to freeze their eggs) to keep women in the workplace. The government who collects the tax dollars from those women now (whereas children these women would have if they could take time out is a future benefit) is also not unhappy about keeping women in the workplace. But a lot of the culture that leaves both men and women childless, is based on a myths that need to be busted.

The Myths

Myth I: Woman’s productive years are the same as a man’s

So much public and private policy is aimed at doing everything possible to keep women in the workforce during what they deem as the economically productive years, which is basically up until retirement at 65.

The assumption is that women in their reproductive years (when they are fertile) are also in there most productive years in terms of work. This is simply not the case. Anecdotally I have found retirement aged women some of the best employees, less anecdotally women live longer on average and do less physically demanding jobs that can be done at any age. There might be even an argument, although a very unpopular one, that menopausal women are physiologically better adapted to the workplace given that a drop in estrogen leaves a greater balance of testosterone. Women in their later years might actually contribute more to the workforce than women in their younger years.

The cultural narrative that puts women on the same life track as men - study, get career on track, start a family - is completely wrong. Men and women are not fungible and giving them different advice on average would serve them each much better.

Myth II: Men and Women and Fungible

Women and men are not the same. In a recent book by Richard Reeves, he proposes a policy of “red-shirting” boys (holding them back) due to the difference in maturity between teen girls and boys creating an unfair advantage for girls in education. This explains why girls in their out-achieving boys in almost every educational and economic metric.

Conversely, the fact that women are doing so well puts them on the track to continue achieving. This is the trap that I fell into. I did well at school and was offered a place at a law school, so I took it, I finished my degree and went to London where I was offered a job as a paralegal, so I took it, I came back to Australia and ended up practicing as a lawyer so I kept taking the opportunities I was offered. None of this I regret as there is no way I could have had kids in that time as I was lacking the thing that most people that end up childless lack, a partner. So, of course I was going to keep earning money so that when the conditions came together (or even if they didn’t and I had to have kids by myself) I could start a family.

The life path that we put both men and women on don’t serve either of them on average. Boys who on average go through puberty 2 years later than girls end up eating their dust as the young women get propelled into careers during their best reproductive years which lead many of them to miss them and have to rely on fertility technology such as IVF in order to have families when finally the conditions come together to enable that.

Myth III: We can now delay having children

I have been told by women older than me who regret not having children to “just freeze my eggs” like it is the panacea to prevent this. It is not. Many frozen eggs do not work and at the time women go to use these it is probably their only option to get pregnant, so the stakes are really high. There are also technologies such as IVF that can assist and are very successful but also very expensive and by no means side-effect free and an increasing cultural. There are also on-medical intervention in child-creation such as increasing legal acceptance of surrogacy that has a host of implications.

Technology makes it possible to have kids later in life, but that doesn’t mean it is desirable. The social implications of starting a family at the end of life means that the kids born will probably never know their own grand parents and the women having them will not be around to meet their grand kids, and having intergenerational support is one thing that makes having children far more obtainable.

Worse still, the women having kids at this age will only have a short time (compared to women who start families in their 20s and 30s) to spend with their own children. I say this even though I am from a family where the women have all given birth to their last child in their 40s (my sister is 14 years younger than me). My father, nana, grandfather etc all had this same family pattern of the baby of the family born to an older mother who keenly felt the implications of having children later in life compared to in their younger years.

Delaying childbearing is difficult for women but nowhere have women been told this, instead we tell them to delay until they have their careers ontrack, telling them this is possible now with all this technology to enable them to have kids at any time. This is a terrible lie that we tell women.

We also tell a lie to men that they can have children at any time. Whilst technically true, functionally this is a lie as men’s capacity to have children is restrained by the women willing to start a family with them, which unless they are very desirable man will typically be a woman around their age.

In fact childlessness among men is higher than among women. This has always been the case throughout history as men have the potential to father multiple children at once. Whilst alternative forms of relationship (like ethically non-monogamy) is on the rise the reason for men that have children have many more than women, at the same time men that don’t have any is far more than women is due to serial monogamy - i.e. men and more likely to have a second family following a divorce than women are.

So even for men, delaying having children is a very bad idea, but again we don’t tell them this.

The Real Reason

What people say is the reason for the decline in child birth tends to be a kind of Rorschach test where everyone blames their pet societal ill. It’s housing prices, decline in religion, feminism, decadence, economic decline… all things that no doubt contribute but are not the root cause.