East better than West for pro-natalist engineering

This is the second installment of a two-part essay.

The first part of this essay argued that for any pro-natalist policy to be cost-effective in its use of public funds, it must recapture lost efficiencies of labor specialization, including economies of scale, that the large families of past centuries captured. 

It also pointed out that no pro-natalist policy has tried to do this and suggested that this failure may largely account for the paucity of success achieved by prior pro-natalist policies.

Of the diverse institutional arrangements that might recapture the lost benefits of specialization in child-raising, some seem likely to encounter greater cultural resistance than others.

There is no size limit on orphanage-like institutions in which large numbers of children are raised by child-raising specialists to whom the children are not related biologically. Such institutions can achieve greater economies of scale in child-raising than can even the largest family.

However, orphanages have always and everywhere been considered inferior to families as child-raising institutions. They have been used only when both the nuclear and the extended family have failed. 

In the West, adoption of children from orphanages into families has long been encouraged by society through diverse institutions, including orphanages themselves.

Consequently, to advocate the use of orphanage-like institutions to implement pro-natalist policy – which presumably would entail paying women to bear children to be raised by such institutions – might encounter substantial resistance and occasion disparagement as advocacy of “baby mills” or “kiddie farms.”

By contrast, to promote and fund a limited number of large families in which children are raised by their biological parents would encounter no such resistance rooted in traditional culture; the large biological family is a time-tested institutional arrangement for raising children.

However, there are limits to the economies of scale that a biological family can safely capture. The largest number of children that a woman can bear, consistent with the childbirth-risk-minimizing constraints of bearing a child every 27 to 33 months, starting no earlier than age 18 and continuing no later than age 45, is about 12, which was also the largest often-observed family size in the US as late as the 1960s.

If a woman gives birth once every 30 months from age 20 to age 44 – i.e., every 2.5. years for 25 years – then she will bear ten children. That seems the best target for a pro-natalist policy that seeks to recapture the benefits of specialization in child-raising by reviving the large biological family.

However, to raise ten children not inferior to those raised by a one-child family in which both parents work outside the home save for five years during which the wife stays home to raise an infant would require both father/husband and mother/wife to stay home and specialize in child-raising throughout most of their adult lives. 

In the middle of that couple’s child-raising career, when they are raising five, six or seven children at once, the assistance of a maid/nanny or two might also be required. One or both members of a professional child-raising couple aged 62 or older, no longer raising children of their own, might provide such assistance.

In order to recruit and employ young married couples to specialize in child-raising starting no later than when the woman is 20 years old, it would be necessary to recruit them soon after the woman completes her secondary schooling. 

This would entail advertising the existence of this career path to secondary school students, and helping secondary school students interested in such a child-raising career to meet and date other such students of the opposite gender and to marry soon after graduating from secondary school and receiving a marriage-contingent offer of employment as specialized child-raisers from age 20 to age 65, presumably with an old-age pension thereafter.

However, starting to raise children at age 20 need not preclude post-secondary education for either member of a specialized child-raising couple. During the first three-and-a-half years before the birth of the second child, there would be ample time for substantial post-secondary schooling, which might continue, with less time devoted to it, until the birth of the third child about 2.5 years later.

Furthermore, this post-secondary education would ideally be well-rounded schooling that specialized child-raisers might enjoy acquiring. Not only math and science but also the humanities and social sciences are useful in raising children.

Additional economies of scale external to particular specialized child-raising families might be achieved by cooperation among such families in purchasing diverse goods and services, and perhaps even by a judicious modicum of co-location. 

However, an excess of co-location, in which whole towns or neighborhoods are inhabited chiefly by specialized child-raising families, seems undesirable.  A society in which specialized and generalized child-raising households are segregated from one another is to be avoided. 

The children of one-child families and the children of ten-child families should not first encounter one another as adults; they should attend school together, play together, befriend one another and visit one another’s homes.

Three important but complex questions, the best answers to which may vary from country to country, fall outside the scope of this essay. 

One is how best to assess and control the quality of state-funded specialized child-raising, which presumably involves monitoring both the process and its young-adult products. 

The second is whether a state-funded program to reverse fertility decline by means of married couples specializing in child-raising might better be administered directly by the state or by private contractors subject to both state-specified requirements and state monitoring.

The third is how to cope with non-performance. If a specialized child-raising couple divorces or separates or simply stops having children, what to do? Termination of employment and loss of pension may help to deter such non-performance, but what to do with the children when such deterrence fails?

One possibility is to have specialized child-raisers above age 62, no longer raising children of their own, help out in such situations.

In the long run, some novel “middle way” between specialized child-raising families and orphanage-like institutions might prove useful. 

Something like a British boarding school, students at which spend holidays (as many as 22 weeks a year) with their biological parents, but in which children would be enrolled from infancy, comes to mind as a way of reviving two- or three-child families.

However, to test such novel institutions would take at least two decades, until the quality of the young adults produced is observable.  East Asia cannot afford to wait that long before starting to reverse its fertility decline. 

It might best experiment with novel ways of raising children in some mix of small families and non-family institutions while implementing a policy of funding many specialized child-raising families.

So what proportion of the workforce needs to specialize in child-raising? To replace the population, given the low levels of child mortality now observed in all but the poorest countries, requires a total fertility rate (TFR) of 2.1 live births per woman per lifetime. 

If a country had a long-stable TFR of 2.1 and no changes in mortality or average childbearing age and no net immigration or emigration, then it would also have a stable population.

Suppose such a country had 20-to-44-year-old age cohorts of which half were women and in which life expectancy for both males and females was 80 years, and replaced its population wholly from specialized child-raising couples that bore and raised an average of ten children every 2.5 years starting in the woman’s 20^th year and did no other paid work from age 20 to age 62. 

The women of such couples would bear 1.31% ([2.1/2.0] x [1/80^th]) of the population every year. Since 2.5 women are needed to bear one baby per year safely, the specialized child-raising women would constitute 3.28% (2.5 x 1.32%) of the population. They plus their husbands, constituting 6.56% (3.28% x 2) of the population, would be employed solely in child-raising. 

If the 20-to-64-year-old workforce were 45/80^ths of the population, then 11.67% of the workforce would be engaged in specialized child-raising (including post-secondary education early in their careers and helping young specialized child-raisers late in their careers). 

Because mortality increases above 64 years and below 20 years, the 20-to-64-year-old workforce would be more than 45/80^ths of the population, so less than 11.67% of the workforce – perhaps roughly 10% of the 20-to-64-year-old workforce – would be engaged in specialized child-raising.  Conversely, about 90% of the workforce would never bear or raise a child.

In the case of a country with a long-declining and now far-below-replacement TFR, the analysis would be far more complex, even with the assumptions of no migration and no change in mortality or age of child-bearing.

Nevertheless, for a country with TFR of 1.05 – which is roughly what China’s TFR is now thought to be – to double its TFR to the population-replacing TFR of 2.1 by specialized child-raising, the proportion of the 20-to-64-year-old workforce that would have to work as full-time child-raisers might be roughly 5%, i.e., half the roughly 10% needed to supply a stable population wholly by such means. 

For such a country to raise its TFR by two-thirds, to 1.75, by means of specialized child-raising, might require something like 3.5% of its 20-to-64-year-old workforce to work as full-time child-raisers.

Despite their simplifying counterfactual assumptions, these crude guesstimates provide a rough sense of the magnitude of the labor resources needed.  Demographers with access to detailed national data could quickly provide far more precise country-specific estimates.

Child-raising is a relatively labor-intensive activity, using less capital than most work in rich or even middle-income countries. Consequently, the proportion of GDP required to meet a TFR target by state-funded specialized two-parent child-raising will be smaller than the proportion of the workforce required to do so in all but poor countries. (Only in a few poor countries has fertility fallen far below replacement.)

However, for such a pro-natalist program to attain a target TFR would take 25 years, assuming no unforeseen changes in relevant variables, if only 1/25 of the eventually-desired number of specialized child-raising couples were hired every year. 

If the program were front-loaded to shorten the time needed to achieve the target, then some labor would later have to be redirected from child-raising to other uses to avoid a period of above-target fertility.

For example, if a government wants to increase its country’s TFR to a specified target level in 12.5 years rather than 25 years, and then to keep the TFR at that level, then it will need to hire for the first 12.5 years twice as many child-raising couples as it eventually wants, then change the work of half of them, after 12.5 years, from professional parenting to something different, such as teaching school. Schoolteachers might be in short supply after a rise in fertility.

East Asia, which for millennia has been the source of diverse innovations that the West has found useful, seems far more likely than the West to innovate effective pro-natalist policy for at least three reasons.

First, East Asia has lower and faster-falling national TFRs than the West and therefore needs effective pro-natalist policy more urgently than the West. East Asians cannot afford to wait for the West to innovate effective pro-natalist policy and then copy it, as they have copied diverse Western technological and institutional innovations during the past two centuries.

Second, to reverse fertility decline enough to avoid future economic disaster and demographic oblivion, even by the cost-minimizing means suggested by this essay, would entail substantial sacrifice in the present, and therefore may prove impossible for countries with formally democratic governments. East Asia, unlike the West, includes several countries with governments that are not democratic in form.

Third, most East Asian countries, being more ethnically and culturally homogeneous than most Western countries currently, are less paralyzed by cultural, ideological and ethnic divisions that make it virtually impossible for many Western countries to innovate a state-funded program to reverse fertility decline by reviving specialized child-raising.

To administer, legislate or even advocate such a program in the United States would be a nightmare.  Some Americans would demand that any such program perpetuate existing cultural and ethnic divisions; others would demand that it ignore such divisions; still others would demand that it seek to alter such divisions in a particular way, e.g., toward less traditional Western culture and fewer white people.  Compromise would be impossible; the culture wars among groups that loathe one another preclude it.

This problem cannot be avoided by awarding contracts for specialized child-raising to the least-cost private-sector bidders that meet specified quality requirements. Absent statutory constraints, the least-cost bidders would be bidders subsidized by some private organization or billionaire with an ideological, cultural or ethnic agenda – i.e., to increase the proportion of the population that is white (or non-white), or Muslim (or Evangelic Christian, or Catholic) or raised “woke” (or traditionally). 

However, to enact statutory constraints on such subsidization would require impossible compromise among domestic cultural enemies.

However, if East Asia innovates a successful pro-natalist policy, then much of the West will be far more likely to copy it than it would be to innovate such a policy, not only because the feasibility of reversing fertility decline will have been demonstrated, but also because not to copy East Asia in reversing fertility decline would tend to make a Western country increasingly poorer, smaller and weaker relative to East Asia.

The US central government may be too paralyzed by cultural and ethnic divisions even to copy another country’s successful pro-natalist policy. 

However, the US also has 50 state governments, any of which could copy such a policy. The governments of states that are culturally less diverse than the US as a whole might copy a successful East Asian pro-natalist policy if the US central government does not prevent them from doing so.

Although the US is now too crippled by diversity to lead the non-African world in the survival-critical matter of reversing fertility decline, parts of the US may not yet be too diverse to follow leadership offered by East Asian countries more homogeneous than the US.

Ichabod is a former US diplomat.