But if you accept these results and combine them, you get an emphasis on work and finances over family, religion and politics that seems extremely relevant to the debate over the developed world’s declining birthrates.
A key question in that debate is whether the general fertility decline reflects what people actually want or whether it’s being somehow imposed, either by economic conditions, cultural expectations or some social or technological disruption. There’s a reasonable case, made by the demographer Lyman Stone among others, that modern people’s desire for kids hasn’t dropped as much as one might think, that if more parents achieved what they consider the ideal family size, they’d usually have two or three kids and overall births wouldn’t be dropping so dramatically. In which case we should be worrying about the external obstacles to desired fertility, whether that means economic forces like the expense of parenting or some cultural force — like the crisis of heterosexual pairing-off that’s driving down rates of marriage, dating and sex.
But the Pew data suggests a way that economic and cultural forces can unite to shape the way that people set priorities for adulthood. It’s possible, in this reading of the evidence, to grow up with the same theoretical aspirations for marriage and family as past generations, but also receive a strong cultural message that everything a different society might regard as fundamentally bigger than your job — religious faith and political ideology as well as love, marriage, kids, grandkids — is actually secondary, and however many children you want on paper, the essence of a valuable adulthood rests in work and money.
One term for this worldview is “workism,” defined by The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson in 2019 as a quasi-religious commitment to fulfillment through intense professional commitment (and discussed at length by Stone and the sociologist Laurie DeRose in a 2021 Institute for Family Studies paper on global fertility).
You can interpret the workist worldview as meritocracy gone wild, its values spreading beyond the overeducated upper class to infuse and convert society as a whole. Or you can interpret it through the lens of Daniel Bell’s famous 1970s analysis of capitalism’s “cultural contradictions” — as an example of consumer capitalism’s logic working itself out to an ultimately self-undermining conclusion (because without marriages and kids there won’t be enough consumers soon enough).
Either way, in the Pew data, workism looks unmistakable and powerful — looming above religious commitment, political allegiance and even reproductive self-interest when it comes to what American parents want, or think they should want, for their kids.
Ross Douthat
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