Are Men to Blame for the Birth-Rate Collapse? - The Atlantic

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Society is running out of babies, and no one can agree on why. Most people around the world, including Americans, live in a country where overall fertility is below what demographers call the “replacement rate,” meaning that without migration, the population will shrink from one generation to the next. In some places, the birth rate is so low that each generation is set to be half the size of the previous one.<br>A number of theories have been put forward to explain why this is happening. Some experts point to smartphones and social media, others to the cost of child care, still others to existential dread or overparenting. Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize–winning labor economist, favors another explanation: It’s the men. In a widely discussed new working paper, she argues that husbands still fail to do their fair share of housework and child care, forcing their wives to choose between procreation and career success. As a result, women are making the economically rational decision to have fewer kids. “The more that men can credibly signal they will be dependable ‘dads’ and not disappointing ‘duds,’ the higher the birth rate will be in the face of greater female agency,” Goldin writes in a companion essay.<br>Goldin’s theory is attractive because it promises to resolve an uncomfortable tension in the fertility discussion. Historically, falling birth rates have accompanied increases in women’s education and autonomy. This was widely seen as a good thing when it meant going from seven kids on average to two or three. Now that birth rates have fallen below replacement, however, calls to reverse the decline can sound like attacks on feminism itself. But if Goldin is right, there’s no tension. Under her framework, rising equality for women helped bring birth rates down, and only more equality will get them back up.<br>Unfortunately, the theory does not appear to be true. The data simply do not support it. For decades, men have been increasing their share of housework and child care. But the number of babies just keeps falling.<br>When a country gets richer, its fertility tends to decline. But in the 1990s, scholars noticed that some high-income countries, such as France and Norway, had much higher fertility rates than others, such as Japan and Italy. What could explain this variation?<br>Some hypothesized that traditions change more slowly than economies. In the Japans and Italys, they theorized, women were being told to be modern outside the home while still being asked to perform most of the labor inside it, leaving them burned-out and uninterested in having the usual two or three children. In the Frances and Norways, meanwhile, people were having more children because they were confident that things would be fairer in their households. “Women are able to see what happens to other women,” Peter McDonald, an Australian demographer who, in 2000, wrote one of the most famous papers proposing this theory, told me.<br>Goldin’s new paper builds off the work of McDonald and others. Her theory is that countries with low fertility are experiencing a “mismatch” between women’s desire to be modern and men’s desire for them not to be. The paper proposes a simplified economic model to describe reproductive decisions. In the model, men are either “dads” who do sufficient child care and housework or “duds” who do not. If an educated woman marries a “dud” and has children, he won’t help out much, forcing her to limit her career and end up earning the same wage as if she had not gone to college. If she instead marries a “dad,” she can have kids and still realize her full economic potential. At a societal level, because these women don’t know which type of man they’ve married until after they have had a child, they’ll base their decision on whether to have children in proportion to the ratio of dads to duds in their country. The fewer the duds, the more comfortable they will be giving birth to the next generation without fear of a wage penalty.<br>Marc Novicoff: The birth-rate crisis isn’t as bad as you’ve heard—it’s worse<br>All economic models are simplifications, but some make more reasonable assumptions than others. Goldin’s model assumes that only college-educated women weigh whether to have children, but in some countries, including the United States, women who haven’t graduated from college are shifting toward childlessness faster than women who have. Another key assumption is that dad-or-dud status is randomly and blindly assigned. In fact, prospective couples are probably sorting more finely than ever. People are more likely to marry other people of similar education levels, the share of marriages that end in divorce is down, and the time spent living together before having children is up. We have never had more time to examine our partners before having children, and the chance of randomly drawing someone with sharply different beliefs about household...