Creating a baby boom!

Birthrates are falling globally except in Islamic world. Japan, China in the East and European countries in the west have tried to improve this and failed. Lets solve it.

In the developed countries, birth rates are declining. In many countries, they are below the replacement rate.

China presents a unique case in this mix. Faced with low resources, the impending alarm raised by Malthusian forecasts drove China to a below-replacement rate one-child policy. The resulting population collapse has become unstoppable. The Chinese government reversed the one-child policy and is now forcing 2-3 children on families to no avail. The birth rates seem impossible to drive higher.

India is not in this position yet. But in about two decades we will be. Birth rates are declining in India as well. So what can countries do? Let us dive in.

I) Reasons for lower birth rates

The reasons for the baby bust that we see globally cluster around a few areas. Some of them are misrepresented in pop culture.

The core of the problem comes from higher costs of living.

• The high cost of living is directly correlated with high real estate prices.

• High Cost of Living imposes compulsory two-income households on families. That, in turn, drives demand and hence costs for childcare.

• Working women are likely to tinker around with their childbearing window and their career progression window. It is directly because of work or the longer education required to access the high-value jobs. It shortens their childbearing window between late 20s and early 40s (with assisted births). It cuts the best 10 years of childbearing out of the equation.

• Modern jobs have become polarized (technically bi-modal job availability) with many low-income jobs and few high-income jobs. Employment and income uncertainty are also high. These factors drive the need to create a larger buffer before married couples bring a child into the world. It delays childbearing.

• The polarised job market puts pressure on educational demands on the child. It translates into a higher cost for education.

• While many countries subsidize childbirth-related medical care, others don't, and the cost and time required for this care are pretty high.

Some of these realities translate into cultural coping mechanisms.

• High housing costs mean it is cheaper and more convenient to get two small apartments closer to a person's work rather than create a reasonable family home, which is inconvenient for both.

• It leads to a change in lifestyles. The society becomes more individualistic and hedonistic. Both reduce cultural pressure to have children. Instead, both create a pressure AGAINST childbearing.

• Cross-gender competitiveness in education and careers leads to fewer children, especially among urban women.

Health and Biological impact of pollution and lifestyle

• Lifestyle issues (e.g., obesity, urban living) affect fertility. There is global recognition of the declining male sperm counts globally. Declining testosterone and higher estrogen in males have reduced fertility and are being attributed to various changes in diet and environmental contaminants.

• Climate change and resource scarcity discussions have fanned fears, discouraging young families from having children.

Time factor

While all the above factors are critical, cost affects things differently - rich people don't have as many babies - poor have lots of babies. Higher costs reduce parental time, and you need time to have kids. The amount of time you need to raise a kid has gone up. Part of it is the result of the helicopter parenting style we have chosen. But part of it is the safety and security of the young one.

II) So what will get you the baby boom?

To create a baby boom, we will have to rethink certain areas crucial to this goal. In these areas, we must challenge the fundamental assumptions and things we take for granted. We will need bold reinvention in these issues.

Rethinking Communities

It is a simple fact that families cannot have more children in a low-trust environment.

Modern cities see a continuous flow of new and unknown people. While this has economic benefits, it makes the environment a low-trust environment. Modern cities are a paradise for "urban anonymity" that reduces social trust.

It is easier to notice this yourself. You may feel less anxious in a gated community where you still do not know your neighbours, yet feel more secure in the knowledge that they had to be vetted before being admitted.

To create a high-trust environment, we will need to develop mechanisms to create a high-trust environment despite the urban churn. We want to create a new version of communities better suited to modern times.

Communities play a profound and foundational role in making the children socially functional. However, the acceptability into communities still follows older norms. It is inexplicable that our most intimate encounters can be anonymised through Apps, but admission into our communities requires deeper scrutiny. If we are going to create trusting communities in this world of fluid populations and frequent home changes, we need to come up with new community norms.

Rethinking child-rearing

The increasing demands of raising a child are perhaps a corollary of low-trust environments. A few decades ago, children did not need as much monitoring or involvement. It was an age of free-range children.

The biggest advantage of free-range child-rearing is that the children get to understand the risk ladder. The feedback loop of action-consequences starts early, works well, and embeds itself into the psyche. The children learn to recognise risks, measure or estimate the risks, and, crucially, take the right risks. The children become risk-tolerant. I suspect protected children are not risk-calibrated. We need risk-calibrated people in modern times.

But, all this is easier said than done. The reforms and reinvention required to enable this in a modern environment go to the very foundation of urban design, privacy, law and order and many other disciplines.

Rethinking Children education

Free education is going to be a critical social good in the coming times. However, free education only sounds great. Free education is paid for by taxpayers. That is simply shifting the burden to another pocket, not reducing it in the least.

However, the more I think, the more I agree that "Education cannot be free, it has to be paid by effort in learning the real skills and applying them to the real world." This means that industry and value creators will have to drive education. It does put a larger onus of education on the society, but it removes the cost of education as a limiting factor for childbearing.

The solution may be a dual free and paid approach.

The education will be free if your interests align with the community's demands, and you will have to pay for it if you pursue something individual-driven. Thus, if you have an aptitude and intention towards engineering, your engineering education will be free. Despite your engineering aptitude, if you want to pursue medicine, you will have to pay for it. Our mass testing methodologies cannot differentiate between these, so yes, we will have to reinvent that.

Redesign work around family life

Today, we are trying to design a family life around work life. It is ass-backwards. We need to design work-life around family life.

I am not saying that the choice to focus on work-life and arrange the family life was wrong till around the 1980s or so for the developed world. However, with basic affluence, we are now at a stage (in the developed world) to redesign work around life. It will create and nurture some of the changes we highlighted above.

We have moved on from the days of punch cards and have embraced some level of work from home. But we still run on twin-track mode - work and life as two parallel tracks that conflict. We may have to create a system where work and life are merged. As I extend this thought, I come up with families working together, living together, raising kids together and having a group identity. (This sounds increasingly like traditional Indian Jatis, but I digress.)

III) How to create it?

It is said it takes a village to raise a child, but we no longer have these villages. We need to create something new. That is the crux of the problem. Seriously speaking, I don't know. It appears that it is every society to itself.

Can we create such a future from first principles? It will require rethinking many of our disciplines and theories - from urban development, education, work culture, trade and communities to family norms, privacy, and law and order. We do have good insights into many of these disciplines. So we definitely can.

We are at a point where we have a fully stocked kitchen AND we have a good idea of what ingredients we must use. It is a question of experimenting and creating the perfect dish from this.

I would nudge the social scientists and philosophers of our times to create such a society at least as a fictional story, and explore the possibilities. Let us imagine this perfect dish and relish it in our imagination.

If there is one human achievement we can be proud of, it is that if we can imagine it, we can create it soon enough.

---