... or, Paying More For Procreation.
The West, in pursuit of cheaper goods and seduced by the profits that come from globalization, has offshored nearly all of its manufacturing to China, Vietnam and India. In doing so, it lost a ton of good-paying, blue-collar jobs the could provide high school graduates with meaning, purpose and fulfillment. In particular, we lost some of the essential elements of manhood for those not going on to college.
Women don't want to marry a man who makes less than they do. That's been born out by studies over and over again. In fact, you don't need a study when you can just sample the TikTok or YouTube videos of single women talking about what they want in a man. Blue collar men struggle to make a living when there aren't any blue collar male jobs.
Fertility rates across the West have dropped and are now well below replacement. In Italy it's 1.3, in Germany it's 1.5 and in the US it's 1.7. Replacement rate is about 2.1. Many countries have tried to tinker with their tax code to encourage women to have more children. It never works because that's not the problem. The problem isn't the lack of a $500 tax credit, it's the lack of acceptable men.
I wonder if, as the Trump Administration pursues onshoring manufacturing, partially driven by VP J. D. Vance's own post-industrial Ohio experience, it will simultaneously onshore babies. Yes, we will pay more for our goodies, perhaps, because the labor costs might rise, but at the same time, we will could ensure that there will be a future generation to support those same industries.
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| Are widgets and babies interchangeable? In most ways no, but in some important ways, maybe yes. |
4 comments:
China birthrate: 1.18 children/woman
India birthrate: 2.01
Vietnam birthrate: 1.94
I don't see where these countries that you called out specifically have birthrates much if any higher than in the US or Europe (indeed, China is quite a bit lower), so I doubt that the availability of manufacturing jobs is doing much for the birthrate. According to the people that I know personally who are from China and India, the main reasons they don't have more kids is the same as here: at the family level, children cost a lot of money and take a lot of time, and a lot of people don't really like children much to start with. So there is a lot of pressure to have fewer of them. China is unusually low because they had their one-child policy for about a generation, but even though they've since reversed that, people there have decided that they don't want the expense of going back to large families.
The countries with the highest birthrates are not, by and large, what I would call manufacturing powerhouses, as you can see from this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
In fact, the top 50 or so are almost entirely countries in Africa. Make of that what you like.
When I was a kid on the farm in the 60s-70s, there was a fairly stark division between the farm families and the ones who lived in town. Farm families tended to have a lot of kids (usually around 3-8), while the non-farming families in town tended to have one or two. It was generally agreed that this was because the farm families needed the extra labor, while the families taht made their livings in other wasy didn't. I expect that is what is going on in Africa: There is still a lot of subsistence farming, and so parents have a lot of kids who can produce enough labor to pay for themselves by the time they are around 6 or so (and are turning a net profit by the time they are around 10)
I expect that we could substantially boost the birthrate in the US by putting about 30% of the population back onto small farms of maybe 160 acres or so, and forcing them to raise their own labor force to work them. But there are a number of reasons why that is almost certainly not going to be workable.
Necessary is not the same as sufficient. Even if the men made more money, you can't get to replacement birthrates if your culture forcefully encourages women to focus on their careers. Further, you won't get there is, as in China, your government suppresses individual freedoms and expression.
if not is. oh well
My point is that increases in manufacturing jobs have historically correlated with a decrease in fertility, not an increase. Part of that is that cities are genrally bad places to raise more than a few children, and are typically population sinks, not sources. They have long depending on immigration from rural subsistence-farming sources to increase their population.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/industrialization-and-fertility-in-the-nineteenth-century-evidence-from-south-carolina/EF50A5B2E7BA8C6BDDBCC1067C35CD25
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