Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them.
What I propose is something far simpler: make the fertility rate the proxy for a nation’s wellbeing.
The Many Benefits to the Fertility Rate As Wellbeing Index
Sure, you might be able to cheat on your partner, but you can’t cheat the fertility rate. There are no surveys, it’s not self-reported and the statistical tricks are minor, comprehensible and feature no value judgements. As a statistic, it’s far more accurate than inflation or GDP.
But why should this single statistic be the proxy for wellbeing?
Here comes my central claim: most social ills are downstream of whether you can or have formed a long-lasting relationship with a special someone and had offspring. So if you want to improve a nation’s wellbeing, arrange things so people form long-lasting relationships, with children. Doing anything else is just treating symptoms of social malaise rather than attacking the cause. Don’t just take my word for it: there seems to be a link between a drop in fertility and a rise in suicide; use of antidepressants, particularly among white women, is galloping along while the gender gap that doesn’t get much coverage is the increasing unhappiness of women since the 1970s despite the many social advances that have taken place.
All generations, the old, the middle-aged and the young, suffer from this lack of family formation and the series of tight relationships it generates over time. Furthermore, the families that are formed are increasingly finding it difficult to manage their affairs due to the need for dual incomes, the geographical dispersal of relatives that can help and the lack of other families in the nearby neighbourhood.
Australia’s fertility rate currently stands at around 1.66. Despite our wealth, although some argue because of our wealth, people are not choosing to form families. What makes things appear better than they really are is Australia’s fertility rate is inflated by family-focussed immigrants coming into the country and popping out kids. Unfortunately, those kids grow up with the Australian anti-natal mind virus and don’t end up having kids. In inner-city and urban-professional Canberra, the fertility rate is 0.62!
Granted, people are freely choosing not to have children. However, we arrange society deliberately to ensure people are more likely to make the choices in their lives that enhance their wellbeing, choices that enrich themselves emotionally, financially and spiritually. When people make the choices in their lives that leave them childless and single, we’ve failed as a society to create the conditions for ensuring a person’s wellbeing. Don’t make me pull out Aristotle’s eudaimonia to explain this!
What the Fertility Rate As the Primary Measure of Wellbeing Can’t Do
Of course it’s stupid to think that much poorer nations with much higher rates of fertility have citizens who enjoy greater wellbeing than Australians. I am by no means advocating for a mechanical or simplistic interpretation of the fertility rate as a one-stop-shop for measuring wellbeing across all societies.
Furthermore, to think of any rise in the fertility rate as a boon would be just as inane as thinking a rise in GDP fuelled by unproductive borrowing and accompanied by out of control inflation is a sign of economic wellbeing. A boost in the fertility rate that stems from a rise in stable families is the goal, not just babies for the sake of babies.
We have to be shrewd about all statistical measures. Compared to the current set people quote, the fertility rate is pretty damn good. What statistical measure do you think gives a better picture of South Korea’s current and future wellbeing? A fertility rate of 0.84 or a rank of 8 against all other countries on this bogus youth wellbeing index? It’s an indictment on the whole wellbeing measurement industry that I couldn’t find any that use the fertility rate as an input into their index!
What the Fertility Rate As the Primary Measure of Wellbeing Can Do
What emphasising the fertility rate can do is recalibrate a nation to focus on what’s of most importance: strong relationships.
Even though a government can’t do much in the short-term to lift the fertility rate, keeping the figure top of mind over time certainly could. Much like governments of all stripes took educational attainment seriously and over time had it lift, a similar effect can take place if the fertility rate is considered as paramount.
There is, however, a cautionary tale in the rates of educational attainment. I think I’m in good company here at Club Troppo when I submit that there’s now too much higher education and it’s of the wrong kind (it’s a wonderful irony that if you’re studying the humanities, you’re less likely to produce humans).
Be that as it may, making governments focus on the fertility rate should have the desired effect of re-orienting society to make it easier for strong families to form. Whether that be via direct cash payments for babies, easier entry into the housing market for young families, reducing unnecessary educational requirements for jobs, reducing taxes for the young, redesigning suburbs for families — some combination of factors should be able to get that fertility rate up and drive higher rates of wellbeing.
In addition, the fertility rate should have a floor that’s about the same across many (most?) demographic categories. The fertility rate should be at least around 2 for inner-city hipsters, outer suburbanites, the rich, the poor, the middle-class, gay people, Lithuanians, Jews, Muslims, Nigerians, Western Australians and maybe even Club Troppo contributors. If it’s not, then we can drive policy changes to enable that uplift in particular sections of the community.
It’s a sign of moral and spiritual decay when a society does not want to reproduce itself. I’ve written elsewhere about why the most basic moral imperative is sustaining life — not necessarily whether you yourself live, but whether your descendants and kin do. Absent this grounding in human propagation, morality can’t make sense. Nor can wellbeing indices that ignore the propagation of the societies whose wellbeing is supposedly being measured.
Of course it’s stupid to think that much poorer nations with much higher rates of fertility have citizens who enjoy greater well-being than Australians.?
Why is it stupid to think this? If well-being is measured by knowing your life has contributed to the future and being surrounded by people who love you perhaps poorer nations are rich in what matters, whilst in the barren west people are overdosing in despair and loneliness and lacking any sense that their life has mattered to anyone.
I’m not against what you say. But there are limits.
In Somalia, for instance, the birth rate is 6.42 and the country is a mess. Many Somalians want to immigrate to Australia for a better life and I doubt there’s anyone putting their hand up to go the other way.
Where it gets more contested are places like Algeria (2.94), Kazakhstan (3.1) or Paraguay (2.5). Again, I bet there are plenty more people wanting to immigrate to Australia rather than in the other direction, but the countries themselves aren’t so bad.
The mercantilists took the absolute size of population as a sign of prosperity. The more you can support on given land the more clever you are. Also a big population meant more cannon fodder if you needed to defend your country or attack another,
Throughout history fertility (and migration) have declined when bad economic outcomes were envisaged. In practical terms high fertility meant a big future demand for housing and some economists alleged the business cycle is synchronous with the house building cycle.
Of course fertility decline will often not be a leading indicator of welfare change. People give up on babies or cease wanting to immigrate when they learn unemployment is rife and business conditions bad. On the other hand low fertility means a smaller demand for housing and durables in the future.
There’s also a long-running link between urban living and low fertility. Ancient Rome, for instance, had a surprisingly low fertility rate.
Upward mobility seems a big part of the issue — people don’t want to feel like they’re going backwards by having kids. So even though now we’re living in plenty, what is considered a well-rounded life is harder to attain due to raised standards and expectations.
Cost of habitation is higher the higher the density. I wrote a paper on this about 10 years back (unpublished) showing that housing cost variations (both rent and capital) explained much of the fertility pattern both across countries and within some countries.
It was a standard Error Correction Model and the signals were pretty strong, but the referees wanted too much effort and I just wasn’t interested enough to continue. Bottom line was that if you are paying too much for rent you won’t plan another kid. The prediction from this model is that Japanese FR will rebound in about 10-20 years as population and rental costs some down. But this ignores the cultural norms/inertial that are hard to change. China has recently discovered this.
Yep, I agree. And I think that’s what needs to change.
I also believe that the Japanese fertility rate will rebound as rental costs drop, but I think that’s a terrible state of affairs in the meantime.
We should be ensuring younger people can have kids and not be worse off. It’s terrible for society and shows we aren’t transferring enough wealth to younger generations or providing suitable means for the young to prosper.
I believe the psychology literature shows the opposite at the individual level – having children negatively correlates with marital satisfaction and after time negatively correlates with happiness (there are confounds people argue over). So you might have effects going different directions at different levels — the number of children might be a correlate of overall well being at the country level, but the opposite is true a the individual level. Well being makes people foolish?
I’ve seen some of that research, which doesn’t seem all that conclusive.
But even if it is true that people are unhappy after procreation, we as a society should change things so that it’s not true. Happy procreators should be the goal — that’s a healthy society, one that can perpetuate itself.
I have not seen the individual level research but I suspect it is bullshit. Happy when? Five years into kids when you compare yourself to the master of the universe Casinova of your twenties? Or happy in your seventies when you can better judge the point of it all?
Not to mention the Everest size confounders of what could make people both have an extra kid and be unhappy. Though this does undermine Antonius’s thesis it seems to me.
Countries with the highest death rate must therefore be the happiest.
The death rate doesn’t directly affect the fertility rate, so it’s not as simple as you suggest.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate:
Sorry Antonius, I do not buy your argument(s) at all.
Your central claim is “Most social ills are downstream of whether you can or have formed a long-lasting relationship with a special someone and had offspring.” If this is your central claim you should have spent a little more time wording it properly. Social “ills” or social “welfare”? This is just sloppy. In any case, the word “stream” suggests a causal diagram and I really wish you could have drawn one. You cannot make head of tail of these kinds of problems without one, and this supports valid arguments about missing variables and arrows and how to estimate the relationships.
Is Canberra the least happy part of Australia? I would focus on Wadeye and Alice Springs and pretty much any remote community where there is zero chance for real employment and there are thousands of unsupervised kids running around the streets after midnight stealing cars and staring into headlights. Paradise? Sorry to be so trenchant!
I am not against the proposition that failing societies will have falling fertility rates ceteris paribus or that having kids is one of the most fulfilling experiences a human can have (again ceteris paribus, since if they starve in front of you it is not so fulfilling). But to design a measure of well-being you need a lot more than is described here. You need some combination of all sorts of variables rthat we would like to masimise and then surrogate measurable constructs to stand in for these.
Your example of South Korea is bemusing. I choose their well-being index, not their fertility rate! I am interested to visit South Korea as well as Taiwan which also has a low FR. My interpretation of your data is that the good folks of South Korea are happy but worry about the unpredictable threat of North Korea. You seem to say that you know better than them. They aren’t having enough rugrats so they can’t be happy. Ultimately, I trust that people know if they rare happy or not.
“What emphasising the fertility rate can do is recalibrate a nation to focus on what’s of most importance: strong relationships.” So it turns out that fertility is NOT so important, it is strong relationships! I would rather a post on this (also rather flimsy) proposition.
Many other public intellectuals such as Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury have noted that relationship measures are important, for instance in the US where only 30% of black kids have their dad living in the same house. Your post seem stronger as an argument for measuring well-being by marriage rates than fertility.
Are the Amish unhappy fools because no one gets an education past the age of about 15? Wellbeing indices, that often weight education highly, would say yes!
I’m not really proposing a single measure like the fertility rate as the one catch-all wellbeing index for all cases. I especially don’t think that applies when considering underdeveloped versus well-developed countries.
I do, however, think that focusing on the fertility rate will work to re-orient societies to focus on their own propagation and the ultimate causes of happiness. Of course, you can’t just look at only the fertility rate, but neither should you only look at GDP. Nevertheless, GDP is perhaps the most important economic indicator going round despite its flaws, and I think, within developed nations, the fertility rate is the most important wellbeing indicator going round despite its flaws.