Everybody in the developed world knows that fertility has cratered across most First World countries over the past few decades and is only getting worse:
The problem has gotten acute enough that many governments have taken, uhh, creative steps to try and induce women to have more babies:
Most of us are not really interested in acquiring a free cow, of course. Yet progressives regularly insist that fertility rates can be boosted if governments just start shelling out massive amounts of parent-related benefits. They claim that paying people in some way or another to have more kids will induce people to have more kids.
The problem is, we have data demonstrating that that's, well, just not true. And the Financial Times reports on yet another example out of the Nordic countries:
Nordic countries' generous family-friendly policies, including long parental leave and publicly subsidised childcare, mean they consistently rank among the best places to raise children. But the policies have not made them immune from the steep fall in women giving birth, which appears to be happening globally.
The Nords when you point out that decades of super-family-friendly policies haven't resulted in any more families:
It's true, though. The data don't lie. Our World in Data shows us that fertility is down everywhere.
It cannot be overstated how completely the think-tank model believed that giving women 400 weeks of government-sponsored paid leave per year was going to solve the problem:
Think-tanks such as Population Europe recommend family-friendly policies to arrest such declines. The advice looks and sounds a lot like the Nordic model. But the latest Nordic data show there have been sharp declines in fertility rates since 2010 ranging from 19 per cent in Greenland to 33 per cent in Finland, compared with a 12 per cent drop in the EU over the same period.
Rune Lindahl-Jacobsen, an epidemiology professor at the University of Southern Denmark, told the Financial Times that such policies are "not aimed at the right audience."
Specifically, he said, the benefits "mainly support people who have already become parents or who have already decided to have children. But if you are a potential first-time parent, you may be thinking about something quite different."
Obviously, "something quite different" is, for most men and women, "not having kids at all." Here's one representative example:
Lykke Kruse Jensen, 27, an undergraduate student, [says] she finds it 'hard to envisage' having children. She and her boyfriend have been together for four years and own their apartment, but neither feels ready for children. She is due to start a two-year master's degree this year, with the aim of gaining stable employment after that.
Most women aren't thinking about having children while (a) being unmarried, (b) pursuing lengthy education careers, and (c) prioritizing career over family formation. You can't escape that!
(Also, those dang phones!)
The Nordic problem, in other words, is the same problem as everywhere else: Most young people just don't want to have kids. Though other trends are driving the fertility rate downwards, such as males' lower educational outcomes and a concurrent rise in women's educational pursuits:
[Lund University Professor Åsa] Hansson says in Sweden, 70 per cent of women go to university and consequently tend to want to form long-term relationships with partners of a similar educational background.
As Hansson told the FT, "There's a lot that can be done, but it's not going to be easy to get there."
I think we can conclude at this point, though, that "family policies" aren't going to help!
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