That men are increasingly living lives in which they feel they are unable to fully flourish, causing women to not want to have children with them, is a problem about which commentators like the Brookings fellow Richard Reeves are sounding the alarm. On his Substack, “Of Boys and Men,” Reeves, the author of a recent book of the same name, describes the challenges facing boys and men that he feels have been “dangerously neglected” and says that the closer he looked, “the bleaker the picture became.”
Skirbekk’s prescriptions could help ameliorate some problems young men are experiencing throughout the developed world. “So far, few policies have effectively addressed some of the main barriers to fertility, including the economic position of the young — which has worsened over recent decades in many countries,” he writes. As my colleague David Brooks noted in September, in America, “The biggest drop in employment is among young men aged 25 to 34.”
Policies that strengthen opportunities for younger men in the labor and housing markets might be more important in increasing fertility rates than “a one-time cash incentive,” says Skirbekk. He also believes that governmental help in creating better work-life balance would facilitate more people having children while they’re still able to. Reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization certainly can help people have babies later in life, but they’re costly and don’t work for everyone.
Skirbekk also believes that encouraging fertility is only going to get us so far, and that low-fertility countries need to adapt to their new reality instead. Growing the earth’s population endlessly is at odds with efforts to address climate concerns. Immigration can be part of the solution, but in our country — a nation of immigrants — there’s no political consensus about how to update our immigration system. Hungary, as I noted last week, has rolled out an assortment of governmental incentives to increase fertility, but despite membership in the E.U. and NATO, is relatively insular, with authoritarian, some would say ethnonationalist, leadership — in any case, we shouldn’t take cues from the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Importantly, even if more countries became more open to more immigration, that isn’t necessarily a fix, since the fertility rate of people from higher fertility countries has been found to decline once they immigrate to lower fertility countries. According to a 2020 report from the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, “nearly all countries hosting the largest numbers of international migrants had fertility levels below 2.1 children per woman, that is, below replacement levels.”
While politically unpopular, some countries are going to revisit the idea of raising their retirement ages — but we could choose to see this as an opportunity to rethink the way we’ve structured work.
In the United States in particular, because full-time work is tied to health insurance, there are fewer opportunities for what we’d think of as quality part-time jobs. In our country, we’re generally expected to work full time until retirement — usually for a period of around 45 years. We make it difficult to work part time during periods of caregiving — for younger children and older family members — and we make it harder to have a slow-fade retirement. Breaking down some baked-in assumptions about work would help fix the growing problem of a lack of working-age Americans without relying only on people to have more babies to fill that need.
Jessica Grose
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