Fewer couples mean fewer children. The problem is that fewer men are becoming someone with whom a woman would want to build a family. A new paper in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences offers an honest diagnosis of this pattern. It also offers one of the worst prescriptions.
The authors, three psychologists led by Mads Larsen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, begin by pointing out that women in rich countries still say they want between two and three children. In Norway, the average stated preference is 2.4. In America, it’s 2.7. Actual fertility rates are 1.4 and 1.6, respectively. The reason for this gap, the paper suggests, is that fewer young women and men are forming stable relationships during their most fertile years. In Norway, the share of women ages 20 to 34 not living with a partner has doubled since the 1970s. According to one estimate by Morgan Stanley, nearly half of American women ages 25 to 44 will be single by 2030.
What drives the decline in couples? Here the researchers say something most demographers won’t: When women became financially independent, the value many men once offered, basic provision and protection, has largely been lost. A woman who earns her own income and lives in a country with a strong safety net doesn’t need a husband to survive. She can hold out for a partner she actually wants.
The authors call this the “Female Choice Fertility Paradox.” Each woman holding out for a better partner is making a sensible choice. But when enough women do it at once, many end up with fewer children than they wanted, or none at all.
Female emancipation reduced the utility of what the authors terms “low-value men.” They even suggest that in previous decades, monogamous marriage was “DEI for men,” meaning that it used to be easier for men to find partners, regardless of their own level of success or attractiveness. Most men could find a wife. Now those norms have weakened.
So far the analysis is sober and largely persuasive. Then the paper takes a turn. If pair bonding can’t be restored, the authors argue, the answer is to help women have children without men. Governments should “consider experiments” offering single women enough money and support to make solo motherhood appealing, with “24/7 nearby childcare.”
The researchers concede this would further reduce men’s value to women and aggravate male marginalization. They argue the stakes justify it. They suggest that “perhaps men should not have to pay child support, particularly if experiments show that women are mostly interested in having children with the most compelling men.”
This is where the paper collapses into fantasy. Take the two-parent family, an institution that the social science literature consistently indicates is one of the most reliable predictors of child well-being we have, and replace it with a state-funded apparatus of cash, communal housing and shift-worker child care. Tell men that their economic role is obsolete and their parental role is optional.
The children in this scheme are an afterthought, as are the men. So, eventually, are the women, who are being told that the right response to a romantic market they find frustrating is to accept a permanent arrangement with the government in place of a husband.
If the problem is that fewer couples are forming, we should ask why. Economics explains some of it. So does culture. Some of it is the slow erosion of norms—religious, civic, familial—that once nudged young people toward marriage before their fertile years ran out. None of that is easy to rebuild. But difficulty isn’t a reason to give up on the family and hand the job to the government.
The fertility crisis is downstream of a pair-bonding crisis. The researchers are correct that the standard explanations miss it. They’re wrong that the way out is to accelerate what the crisis started. A civilization that can’t persuade men and women to form families won’t be saved by subsidizing fatherlessness.
This article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal under the title “Big Brother Is a Bad Daddy.”
"Economics explains some of it. So does culture." Indeed. Yesterday a mother reported that the in thing among teen girls is to approach boys at social events and tell them they are unattractive losers, "you're chopped" in the vernacular. It took a lot for me as a teen to approach girls, in the 70's, not sure I could do it today.
Their conclusion, as with 99% of all sociology, is Marxist garbage as expected. How about this, make every job a total meritocracy, and outlaw any public funding going towards improving outcomes for "marginalised groups". Women succeed in the workplace in many fields that didn't need to exist, like HR which is the fastest growing industry. They produce nothing but conflict, and as the CEO of Bolt, Ryan Breslow, said: firing my HR team made all the problems go away. These are largely jobs for women with humanities degrees, as recompense for them wasting 4 years absorbing feminist literature and why everything bad is only men's fault. A meritocracy would restore order. No more 6 figure salaries for people who make complain-y PowerPoint presentations. No more extra free money for women to get into stem/medicine/everything or forcing companies to hire more women. If you do that, men will naturally make more money because men generally produce more of direct value to the economy (all the energy, physical things, software, hardware, construction), and this trend will reverse to a great extent. Continue to advantage women over men in schooling and workplaces with DEI positions reserved for women who would rather work for a man than love one, and there will be population collapse and then we're completely screwed.