Oskari Juurikkala has an interesting article posted to Mises.org, Making Kids Worthless: Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis. He revives a thesis that many common-sense people have advanced. In fact, R.W. Bradford's mother had explained it to her son when he was growing up. Social Security will destroy the family, she argued. Families stick together because they get help from one another. Take away the need, out goes the bond that holds us together. (Not an exact quote.) It is no great wonder that Bradford grew up to become a libertarian.

This alleged effect of Social Security wouldn't be so bad were what replaced the family better than the family itself. But fluid tribes of friends aren't very stable institutions. And the limits to neighborliness have a notoriety all their own.

The families and clans, on the other hand, are amazingly effective social institutions. The family's dissolution has already led to horrendous problems, especially among the not-so-bright (who become easily tempted with drugs, indolence, and crime).

Trouble is, Juurikkala's article does not consider the other causes of decreasing fertility. For instance, fecundity is highest (not lowest) in that portion of society that most relies upon Social Security for retirement. The richer sector, which could probably survive not getting any Social Security benefits, has a far lower fertility rate.

This seems to be the biggest counter-indicator of Juurikkala's thesis.

Why would this be the case?

For the reasons that economists associated with the Chicago school have given: people, the richer they become, tend to switch from investing in quantity of children to quality of children. This means that they increase investments in their children's educations, and this added cost (which does not diminish in terms of rate with each added child) thus increases the disincentive to produce large families.

It's in the middle class — that is, in the middle income group of higher wage workers and the self-employed — that we might see the effect Juurikkala identifies most clearly.

Still, the absence of a long-run incentive for children doesn't seem as strong as evidently operative near-term incentives and costs.

I think it is more reasonable to regard the family retirement plan of tradition as an unintended effect of having large numbers of children. Similarly, children are itself, for many throughout history, something like an unintended effect of engaging in sexual intercourse. The latter is fun; the children, less so. But the burden of children is reduced by familiar bonds, and the retirement effect.

Socialized retirement schemes do reduce one incentive to hold families together.

But increased availability of contraceptives allow most people to engage in family planning, reducing the birthrate, offsetting Juurikkala's effect.

Further, progress in medicine and agriculture and housing has increased the rate at which children who are conceived actually survive into adulthood, making the probability of conception from sexual intercourse (without contraception) more likely. All this increases the element of rationality, of actual choice and planning, in the production of children. Previously, when most children died before adulthood, and when contraception was very, very unreliable, the possibility of planning was much more chaotic.

Is it any wonder, then, why social mores in the past were so family-centered? It was a way to constrain behavior, and actually nurture the children that were produced. The chaotic element in the production of children had to be controlled. (And societies that didn't have a good way of doing this did not replicate themselves; they died out, so to speak.)

Now families are maintained largely by contract, not tradition and taboo.

Except for one major factor: the welfare state.

Not socialized retirement, but socialized child-rearing and livelihood. The number of women who produce children without any contracted means of supporting them is amazingly high in our society. Why? These mothers have a safety net, and a diminished taboo against bastardy (we can almost say: no taboo against bastardy). If a woman produces a child without being married, and has no means of supporting her child, there are all sorts of government programs there to help her.

The costs of child-rearing have gone down. Until recently, with workfare, one could argue that the costs were negative: a child conceived and raised out of wedlock gave an excuse for the state (taxpayers) to support the woman and her child. Thus producing children became a job, in effect. A low-paying job, but a job nonetheless. The state paid single women to conceive and produce children. And the cost of educating these children was borne almost entirely by the state, through the public education system.

The near-term incentive to engage in sexual intercourse is as great, or greater, than it ever was. Sexual activity is pleasurable, and now nearly everyone knows how pleasurable it can be (the nature of female orgasm, once a guarded secret in many Christian societies — and a thing actually feared in Islamic societies — is now regularly portrayed on TV and popular music, informing all of the possibilities of pleasure through sex).

The near-term disincentives to produce children — the fact that they are expensive to maintain (feeding, clothing, housing, medicating, and educating) — have been greatly reduced by the welfare state.

So of course, with the near-term costs and benefits skewed towards the production of children,some people will increase the quantity of children!

And this is the case in the lower classes, who produce children at higher rates than the wealthy and middle class (not surprisingly, there are more exceptions to this in the middle class than amongst the very wealthy; it should go without saying that all the discussion here assumes the reader can understand generalities and probabilities, without taking offense at any implied particular example or counter-example).

These effects tend not to play as much the wealthier one gets because the amount of money and quality of life amongst the poor is quite low. Anyone who aspires to greater wealth would find these incentives much less weighty. In fact, they can hardly even imagine that they could be effective at all.

Hence the continued unreserved support for them amongst many wealthy persons, utterly clueless about how actual impoverished humanity values and chooses. The rich and the professionals in our society possess radically different value scales because of increased income and wealth levels. They can foresee a future, and they can see the dead-endedness of the life offered by the state. And yet they continue to support these programs — and even argue for their increase — because they impute to the poor a status of victimhood, rarely muddied with an understanding of reflexive behaviors and values.

As pointed out in The Bell Curve, class lines in America are heavily determined by intelligence. The less smart one is, the harder it is to conceive of a longer time horizon, and of a multiplicity of effects of any one act. So, for less smart people, even the disincentive of costs of raising children can seem mistily distant, of lower probability than they care to worry about.

So, they fuck and they produce offspring.

Everyone has some trouble maintaining an extended time horizon, of thinking about the future. But the less the intelligence, the harder this becomes. So of course, just on this basis alone, we would expect lower rates of birth amongst the intelligent. And higher incomes, too.

The nature of schooling is important, also.

For wealthier, more intelligent individuals and couples, an education is something that requires work and investment. It doesn't stop at grade 12, and it is something that students are expected to work at. (Somehwat. Your family's mileage may vary.)

But for poorer, generally less intelligent people, schooling tends to reduce to something to be endured (for students) and something to be used as a babysitter (for parents). K-12 schooling is subsidized in America, and poorer people treat this as no expense at all, as a cost savings.

But education for smarter people (of whatever level of income) seems much more like an investment in the future, with parents willing to spend time and money home-schooling, supervising public education, paying for private lessons and even schools, and saving for college. Completely different attitudes towards education, thus increasing the likelihood of the production of larger numbers of children amongst the poor and decreasing this production amongst the better off.

The question becomes: why isn't there a birth explosion among the lower classes, far beyond current rates?

I can think of a number of factors, with the top two pretty obvious, if not alone persuasive:

1. The ready availability of contraception. Even the dumbest sexually active people use this in a helter-skelter way.




2. The widespread use of abortion to kill conceived fetuses. This has surely put a halt to a huge population explosion. (Though I haven't reviewed which segment of the population uses it most, I suspect this would be most widely used by lower-middle class women and pregnant teens.)

I might add drug use to this. Amazingly high numbers of what becomes the lower classes engage in drug activity that might decrease sexual drive and fertility (certainly the health of meth-addicted mothers). These people are run through a strange mill of welfare and imprisonment, and the latter, at least, tends to upset the ability of people to procreate. (The growing ranks of meth addicts consigned to prisons is amazing, at least in the Western states.)

Can we assign the main reason for decreased productivity to opportunity cost? Sexual activity is as fun as it ever was. And the costs for engaging in it have gone down. Contraception and abortion, especially, have led to a decreased number of babies in production. But surely it is important to us that we live in a wealthy society with many things to do. Music, movies, TV, sports-watching, what-have-you; these compete for the attention of all us away from sexual activity. Further, the growth of the pornography industry has made the old standby alternative to coition, masturbation, much easier. For increasing numbers of Americans and civilized people, sexual activity is becoming a lot like sports: more and more people engage in less and less socially active sex and sport, and instead watch the professionals do it on TV. So this tends to blunt the production of children, too.

There's a lot of fun things to do in society. Drug use may alleviate the vacuity of the lives of hordes of careless people, but art and industry and even work and religion do much the same for more careful folk. And all these things take our attention away from the immediate gratification of sexual intercourse.

Children have always been, to some extent, the joint product of sexual activity. But they are also desired, of course, as ends in themselves (I'll discuss this in a future post). And as hedges against the future, as Juurikkala argues. But when looking to explain the production, distribution, and consumption of children, I tend to look to more immediate effects than to the long-term incentives and disincentives, especially amongst the not-so-brights. Conceiving of the long term is much more difficult, for these people, than engaging in a bit o' fun that conceives a child.