Big Brother Is a Bad Daddy
Subsidizing single motherhood is a terrible response to the fertility crisis.
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Fewer couples mean fewer children. The problem is that fewer men are becoming someone with whom a woman would want to build a family. A new paper in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences offers an honest diagnosis of this pattern. It also offers one of the worst prescriptions.
The authors, three psychologists led by Mads Larsen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, begin by pointing out that women in rich countries still say they want between two and three children. In Norway, the average stated preference is 2.4. In America, it’s 2.7. Actual fertility rates are 1.4 and 1.6, respectively. The reason for this gap, the paper suggests, is that fewer young women and men are forming stable relationships during their most fertile years. In Norway, the share of women ages 20 to 34 not living with a partner has doubled since the 1970s. According to one estimate by Morgan Stanley, nearly half of American women ages 25 to 44 will be single by 2030.
What drives the decline in couples? Here the researchers say something most demographers won’t: When women became financially independent, the value many men once offered, basic provision and protection, has largely been lost. A woman who earns her own income and lives in a country with a strong safety net doesn’t need a husband to survive. She can hold out for a partner she actually wants.
The authors call this the “Female Choice Fertility Paradox.” Each woman holding out for a better partner is making a sensible choice. But when enough women do it at once, many end up with fewer children than they wanted, or none at all.
Female emancipation reduced the utility of what the authors terms “low-value men.” They even suggest that in previous decades, monogamous marriage was “DEI for men,” meaning that it used to be easier for men to find partners, regardless of their own level of success or attractiveness. Most men could find a wife. Now those norms have weakened.
So far the analysis is sober and largely persuasive. Then the paper takes a turn. If pair bonding can’t be restored, the authors argue, the answer is to help women have children without men. Governments should “consider experiments” offering single women enough money and support to make solo motherhood appealing, with “24/7 nearby childcare.”
The researchers concede this would further reduce men’s value to women and aggravate male marginalization. They argue the stakes justify it. They suggest that “perhaps men should not have to pay child support, particularly if experiments show that women are mostly interested in having children with the most compelling men.”
This is where the paper collapses into fantasy. Take the two-parent family, an institution that the social science literature consistently indicates is one of the most reliable predictors of child well-being we have, and replace it with a state-funded apparatus of cash, communal housing and shift-worker child care. Tell men that their economic role is obsolete and their parental role is optional.
The children in this scheme are an afterthought, as are the men. So, eventually, are the women, who are being told that the right response to a romantic market they find frustrating is to accept a permanent arrangement with the government in place of a husband.
If the problem is that fewer couples are forming, we should ask why. Economics explains some of it. So does culture. Some of it is the slow erosion of norms—religious, civic, familial—that once nudged young people toward marriage before their fertile years ran out. None of that is easy to rebuild. But difficulty isn’t a reason to give up on the family and hand the job to the government.
The fertility crisis is downstream of a pair-bonding crisis. The researchers are correct that the standard explanations miss it. They’re wrong that the way out is to accelerate what the crisis started. A civilization that can’t persuade men and women to form families won’t be saved by subsidizing fatherlessness.
Mr. Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”
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The analysis is not persuasive. The study relies on a foreshortened view of history of American history, the one the media loves. That women got "emancipated" from the home (presumably in the 60s) and achieved independence with their own income and this caused the family unit to break down with women not longer having "to settle." Not only do the trends of community/family breakdown start well before women began to enter the white-collar workforce in larger amounts (and these trends do not revolve around women "not having to settle"), but this does not account for the reality that poor women have always worked and many homemakers were forced into the workforce in the 70s -- and these realities complicate the cheap assumptions of the analysis.
More importantly, I would be curious as to how the analysis defines a "low-value" man. Calling marriage "DEI for men" is not funny, especially since I suspect the analysis assumes the value a man brings to the table is financial or some bland rot like "emotional support." Where does romance or love factor in? What about a man who passionately loves a woman but is a little paunchy and works at Best Buy? Is he a low value mate choice for the woman he loves? I suspect he is because like most of these analyses -- whether they are done by feminists or antifeminists or whomever -- there is a common assumption that the basis of marriage is provisioning of resources, financial, emotional or otherwise and not passionate, erotic love. I find that very sad and also indicative of the times.
So what they are suggesting is a few “ compelling “ men get to breed with a large number of women whose babies will then be taken care of by a third party ( government). Sounds like a farm to me.