States should not be in the business of pushing people to have babies. If women
decide to spend their 20s clubbing rather than child-rearing, and their cash on
handbags rather than nappies, that's up to them. But the transition to a lower
population can be a difficult one, and it is up to governments to ease it.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways of going about it-most of which involve
social changes that are desirable in themselves.
The best way to ease the transition towards a smaller population would be to
encourage people to work for longer, and remove the barriers that prevent them
from doing so. State pension ages need raising. Mandatory retirement ages need
to go. They're bad not just for society, which has to pay the pensions of
perfectly capable people who have been put out to grass, but also for
companies, which would do better to use performance, rather than age, as a
criterion for employing people. Rigid salary structures in which pay rises with
seniority (as in Japan) should also be replaced with more flexible ones. More
immigration would ease labour shortages, though it would not stop the ageing of
societies because the numbers required would be too vast. Policies to encourage
women into the workplace, through better provisions for child care and parental
leave, can also help redress the balance between workers and retirees.
Some of those measures might have an interesting side-effect. America and
north-western Europe once also faced demographic decline, but are growing
again, and not just because of immigration. All sorts of factors may be
involved; but one obvious candidate is the efforts those countries have made to
ease the business of being a working parent. Most of the changes had nothing to
do with population policy: they were carried out to make labour markets
efficient or advance sexual equality. But they had the effect of increasing
fertility. As traditional societies modernise, fertility falls. In traditional
societies with modern economies-Japan and Italy, for instance-fertility falls
the most. And in societies which make breeding and working compatible, by
contrast, women tend to do both.
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