The world has a problem. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere, which helps to drive one of our pressing policy challenges: worsening care-dependency ratios or, essentially, the number of people in the working age population available to support, one way or another, those outside it. (I say “one way or another” because a working age adult taking time out to look after young children or ageing relatives is making a contribution, just as much as if they paid someone else to do it for them.)
Thus far, we haven’t found any policy interventions that reliably get birth rates above 2.1 (the replacement rate). Hungary has spent the best part of five per cent of GDP per year to little effect. The generous welfare states of the Scandinavian countries have experienced falls comparable with countries that make rather less generous offers to would-be or prospective parents, such as the US or the UK. The only “solutions” that much of the rich world has found that have worked are, in different ways, not scaleable: the answers being “be Israeli” or “get religion”. Although, for now, the rich world can make up the difference in the working age population through immigration, the fall in fertility rates is a global trend. Sooner or later we have to solve this, or we are in big trouble.
Or at least, that’s what I used to think (and have written in the past). But I’ve changed my mind. Not because I’ve become more relaxed about the problem of care-dependency ratios. If anything, the political problem has only got worse. Measures that seemed like a good idea at the time, such as the triple lock, the UK’s gradual solution to the problem of our relatively meagre state pension, now may be so hard to drop that further increases are prioritised over need elsewhere. Italy’s automatic linking of increases in life expectancy with the state pension age (a reform other countries should copy), may now be unpicked by Giorgia Meloni.