Guy Dampier is a British writer and researcher.
The number of births in Britain has hit a 20 year low. This was welcomed by Professor Sarah Harper CBE, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and a former government adviser, who said:
“I think it’s a good thing that the high-income, high-consuming countries of the world are reducing the number of children that they’re having. I’m quite positive about that.”
She explained that declining fertility in rich countries “will actually be good for general overall overconsumption that we have at the moment and our planet”, and that it is “inevitable”.
Yet while it is true that high-income countries produce much more carbon than low-income ones, reduced demographic growth will also pose a major issue for the economy, with increasing numbers of retired people being supported by a shrinking workforce.
What’s more, young people who have already spent most of their lives without seeing any real growth in productivity or wages, as well as finding it difficult to buy a home, would have to face decreasing living standards even as they’re asked to shoulder more of the economic burden.
We thus risk a sort of democratic hostage situation, where a larger and older population can ensure they are economically secure, such as via the triple lock on pensions, at the expense of the young, who are already facing higher taxes over their lifetimes.
Generally speaking, a fertility rate has to be at 2.1 (2.1 children per woman) in order to keep demographically stable. In 2021 the British fertility rate was just 1.61; the 2022 figures have yet to be released.
In such a situation there are three options: to cull the elderly, as ancient Greeks used to; to encourage people to have more children; or to bring in immigrants to make up the numbers.
The latter has been the most popular policy among Britain’s political class, with migration to this country reaching over one million last year. Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s former Chief of Staff, was one of those advocates, writing that: “Without net migration to fill the gap, growth will be slower and taxes will be higher or spending will have to be cut”.
What does that mean though? As one Twitter poster pointed out, the UN projection would require more than one million immigrants every year, with Britain reaching a population of 136 million in 2050, of whom 80 million would be recent immigrants or their descendants. Such an economic rescue plan would completely and permanently alter the nation; rather “it became necessary to destroy the country to save it”.
Even then, that wouldn’t solve the problem – because immigrants, too, get old. Assuming standards of medical care persist (or improve, as the science advances), it would only exacerbate the underlying problems. Rather like a Ponzi scheme, enormous movements of migrants would be constantly required in order to pay the bills of earlier waves.
What’s more, such thinking completely ignores that immigration is a more complicated issue than simply trying to pack as many warm bodies within a nation as possible.
One reason why Denmark has turned against immigration is that they have very good data on the economic benefits, and costs, of it. What they found is that while Danes and Western immigrants are of net benefit, many non-Western migrants actually cost more than they contributed (those from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey cost the most). Overall, non-Western immigrants and their descendants cost 31 billion kroner, while Western immigrants and their descendants contributed seven billion kroner.
This is especially important because the best performing immigrants come from places like East Asia or other Western nations – precisely those with the lowest birth rates.
Bringing in poorly-performing immigrants will only exacerbate the problems to which immigration is touted as a salve.
For example, large numbers of British Bangladeshis – one of the youngest and fastest growing groups in the UK – are economically inactive, while those in work are often in low-skill sectors. At the same time they’re more likely to receive income-based benefits and occupy large amounts of social housing in our richest city at a time when many high-skilled graduates are priced out of London.
Whatever the case for such immigration is, it isn’t the need to prop up our welfare state. If maximising the economic benefits is the main rationale for immigration, then we need to ask hard questions about the way the system currently operates.
Why, for instance, did we allow 66,000 dependants of Nigerian students to come to this country in just one year? Or why do we make it so that migrants can not only move to Britain for work but also settle here, with all the attendant immediate and long-term costs?
In the United Arab Emirates, the kafala system ensures that migrants can come for work but must then leave once it’s done; in Singapore migrant workers are housed in dormitories, ensuring that they don’t place too much pressure on the housing market.
There are other costs too. More migrants means more stress on public infrastructure. Thus the failure of the British state to build any of it – schools, hospitals, transport links, and so on – to deal with the unprecedented immigration we’ve seen since 1997 has let to a worsening of quality of life for many people.
Too much cheap labour also encourages business to reduce or even reverse the scale of adoption of things like robotics, which is one reason why British productivity remains in the doldrums; employers bank the saving on labour and the taxpayer picks up the tab.
If immigration isn’t the answer, then the problem of the teetering demographic pyramid remains. Without enough high-skilled people having children, our civilisation will become increasingly fragile. And however nice it might sound in the abstract to roll back “over-consumption”, the real politics of stagnation, let alone de-growth, are likely to be very ugly indeed.
Yet there is no single cause of the baby bust. Changing social attitudes have certainly played a part, but the lowest birth rate in the world is that of relatively traditional Korea. Increasing the supply of housing or providing other benefits to families will do some good, but is having only a limited effect in countries, such as Hungary, where it has been tried.
Contraception and abortion (one in four of all pregnancies are terminated) mean that having children is now, for the first time in history, a personal choice. And many people just don’t want to have them, especially given the huge sacrifices asked of parents and the feast of alternatives our modern, consumer society offers.
Mass immigration, at least the way Britain does it, is not a solution either. Harper may thus be right – in the short term, at least – that population decline is inevitable.
But we are not yet in the world of Children of Men. Plenty of people in this country do want children – and tell surveys they have fewer than they would like. There’s also some evidence that proclivity towards having children is genetic, suggesting some at least will always prefer family life to all the delights and temptations on offer.
Thus, the best option for addressing the urgent demographic question – alongside a redesigned immigration system that actually reflects the economic rationale advanced for it – is surely to encourage people to have children, and make it easier for those that do want kids to have as many as they want.
Such a programme could range from big-ticket items, such as policies to help families access family homes, to smaller interventions to make the public square more parent-and-child-friendly. None would be a silver bullet. But over time, enough silver shrapnel might start to add up.
And in the very long run? If proclivity toward parenthood is genetic, and those are increasingly the people having the kids, the problem takes care of itself. Provided we can get our society through the looming fertility eclipse without the whole thing falling over.
Guy Dampier is a British writer and researcher.
The number of births in Britain has hit a 20 year low. This was welcomed by Professor Sarah Harper CBE, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and a former government adviser, who said:
“I think it’s a good thing that the high-income, high-consuming countries of the world are reducing the number of children that they’re having. I’m quite positive about that.”
She explained that declining fertility in rich countries “will actually be good for general overall overconsumption that we have at the moment and our planet”, and that it is “inevitable”.
Yet while it is true that high-income countries produce much more carbon than low-income ones, reduced demographic growth will also pose a major issue for the economy, with increasing numbers of retired people being supported by a shrinking workforce.
What’s more, young people who have already spent most of their lives without seeing any real growth in productivity or wages, as well as finding it difficult to buy a home, would have to face decreasing living standards even as they’re asked to shoulder more of the economic burden.
We thus risk a sort of democratic hostage situation, where a larger and older population can ensure they are economically secure, such as via the triple lock on pensions, at the expense of the young, who are already facing higher taxes over their lifetimes.
Generally speaking, a fertility rate has to be at 2.1 (2.1 children per woman) in order to keep demographically stable. In 2021 the British fertility rate was just 1.61; the 2022 figures have yet to be released.
In such a situation there are three options: to cull the elderly, as ancient Greeks used to; to encourage people to have more children; or to bring in immigrants to make up the numbers.
The latter has been the most popular policy among Britain’s political class, with migration to this country reaching over one million last year. Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s former Chief of Staff, was one of those advocates, writing that: “Without net migration to fill the gap, growth will be slower and taxes will be higher or spending will have to be cut”.
What does that mean though? As one Twitter poster pointed out, the UN projection would require more than one million immigrants every year, with Britain reaching a population of 136 million in 2050, of whom 80 million would be recent immigrants or their descendants. Such an economic rescue plan would completely and permanently alter the nation; rather “it became necessary to destroy the country to save it”.
Even then, that wouldn’t solve the problem – because immigrants, too, get old. Assuming standards of medical care persist (or improve, as the science advances), it would only exacerbate the underlying problems. Rather like a Ponzi scheme, enormous movements of migrants would be constantly required in order to pay the bills of earlier waves.
What’s more, such thinking completely ignores that immigration is a more complicated issue than simply trying to pack as many warm bodies within a nation as possible.
One reason why Denmark has turned against immigration is that they have very good data on the economic benefits, and costs, of it. What they found is that while Danes and Western immigrants are of net benefit, many non-Western migrants actually cost more than they contributed (those from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey cost the most). Overall, non-Western immigrants and their descendants cost 31 billion kroner, while Western immigrants and their descendants contributed seven billion kroner.
This is especially important because the best performing immigrants come from places like East Asia or other Western nations – precisely those with the lowest birth rates.
Bringing in poorly-performing immigrants will only exacerbate the problems to which immigration is touted as a salve.
For example, large numbers of British Bangladeshis – one of the youngest and fastest growing groups in the UK – are economically inactive, while those in work are often in low-skill sectors. At the same time they’re more likely to receive income-based benefits and occupy large amounts of social housing in our richest city at a time when many high-skilled graduates are priced out of London.
Whatever the case for such immigration is, it isn’t the need to prop up our welfare state. If maximising the economic benefits is the main rationale for immigration, then we need to ask hard questions about the way the system currently operates.
Why, for instance, did we allow 66,000 dependants of Nigerian students to come to this country in just one year? Or why do we make it so that migrants can not only move to Britain for work but also settle here, with all the attendant immediate and long-term costs?
In the United Arab Emirates, the kafala system ensures that migrants can come for work but must then leave once it’s done; in Singapore migrant workers are housed in dormitories, ensuring that they don’t place too much pressure on the housing market.
There are other costs too. More migrants means more stress on public infrastructure. Thus the failure of the British state to build any of it – schools, hospitals, transport links, and so on – to deal with the unprecedented immigration we’ve seen since 1997 has let to a worsening of quality of life for many people.
Too much cheap labour also encourages business to reduce or even reverse the scale of adoption of things like robotics, which is one reason why British productivity remains in the doldrums; employers bank the saving on labour and the taxpayer picks up the tab.
If immigration isn’t the answer, then the problem of the teetering demographic pyramid remains. Without enough high-skilled people having children, our civilisation will become increasingly fragile. And however nice it might sound in the abstract to roll back “over-consumption”, the real politics of stagnation, let alone de-growth, are likely to be very ugly indeed.
Yet there is no single cause of the baby bust. Changing social attitudes have certainly played a part, but the lowest birth rate in the world is that of relatively traditional Korea. Increasing the supply of housing or providing other benefits to families will do some good, but is having only a limited effect in countries, such as Hungary, where it has been tried.
Contraception and abortion (one in four of all pregnancies are terminated) mean that having children is now, for the first time in history, a personal choice. And many people just don’t want to have them, especially given the huge sacrifices asked of parents and the feast of alternatives our modern, consumer society offers.
Mass immigration, at least the way Britain does it, is not a solution either. Harper may thus be right – in the short term, at least – that population decline is inevitable.
But we are not yet in the world of Children of Men. Plenty of people in this country do want children – and tell surveys they have fewer than they would like. There’s also some evidence that proclivity towards having children is genetic, suggesting some at least will always prefer family life to all the delights and temptations on offer.
Thus, the best option for addressing the urgent demographic question – alongside a redesigned immigration system that actually reflects the economic rationale advanced for it – is surely to encourage people to have children, and make it easier for those that do want kids to have as many as they want.
Such a programme could range from big-ticket items, such as policies to help families access family homes, to smaller interventions to make the public square more parent-and-child-friendly. None would be a silver bullet. But over time, enough silver shrapnel might start to add up.
And in the very long run? If proclivity toward parenthood is genetic, and those are increasingly the people having the kids, the problem takes care of itself. Provided we can get our society through the looming fertility eclipse without the whole thing falling over.