This is a problem that I started off with two terms ago and echoed by Adam Smith
in 1990 776 in his enquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of Nations,
pointing out that, generally speaking, population was regarded then as in antiquity as an indication of a successful state in a prosperous state.
The reverse of that stagnation, horror's decline was regarded as a clear indication that things are badly wrong.
Such things are happening now in a number of very important countries and will spread to too many others.
These are the topics I'm going to talk about the origins of the of the fear of population decline, the history of responses to it,
the some modern examples of population policy and and some attempts at measuring the effectiveness of
those policies and the results which those have generated to remind you of the antiquity of all of this.
As I mentioned, the antiquity of population policy and concern about poverty, law, regulation of fertility go right back to the earliest times.
Some of the earliest written codes go back to almost 2000 B.C. with the Code of Hammurabi,
which was conceived with all sorts of things, including relations between men and women,
but also included measures to encourage marriage, encourage reproduction, encourage fertility in those days as in most successive millennia.
A population was one of the most important factors of production in times when productivity increases very difficult to obtain and population
size and population growth was a very clear measure of the size of of the nation's economy and the prospects for its defence through it,
through its armed forces and the prospects for improving the environment through great works like building canals and defensive walls,
as well as more frivolous ones like building permits. This remains true today.
After all, while the most important components of GDP so often cited as a measure of growth,
as a measure of welfare of a country's economy is of course the size of its population.
These you can chart all sorts of interesting examples through history,
which are very, very few here of laws and enactments which are well known to us.
They've come down to us through through through papyri, through inscriptions, on stone and various other documentations in the classical period.
And of course, they're much more abundant documentation from more recent historical periods to attempts to to both both the birth rate,
encourage marriage and acquire population from neighbouring countries also as long as they be to be reasonably loyal.
Quite a few of these, of course, were concerned, not so much at all,
not just for the total population, but particularly with the protection of the size of elites.
The the Roman emperors were quite concerned about the relative size of the patrician class compared with the plebeians.
Given the political tensions that existed always between those two great groups of people and the laws of Augustus when he first came to power,
the very first two enactments which he made were concerned with the with the protection of marriage,
the encouragement of fecundity, particularly amongst the patrician class,
by all means of penalties against bachelorhood and rewards for for numerous motherhood in terms of,
amongst other things, changes in laws regarding what you're allowed to wear.
By the time we get to Phillip, the fourth of the 14th and others, we coming to a rather more sophisticated approach.
This is a these are more developed states with much more control over the economy,
with regular systems of taxation, which could be tweaked or manipulated in order to encourage marriage,
discourage bachelorhood, very much the same sort of thing that Augustus is trying to do one and a half thousand years earlier.
But on a more sophisticated scale and in an economy which is much more recognisably
modern and some of the characters that are well worth noting is traumatised.
Culburra minister in the 40s,
not only it was in charge of and in fact invented a kind of economy which is much more dirigiste than that which existed previously,
the embodiment, if you like, of the mercantilist ideal control of of of manufactures, restriction of imports from overseas,
encouragement of of industry, the sort of industrial policy of Mr. Vince Cable is interested in today.
We certainly find favour with Jean-Baptiste Cobell and above all, the protection of population, not just by punishing Batchelor's,
not just by rewarding motherhood and large families with with cash, with medals,
with honours and so on, but also, interestingly, with restricting immigration.
One of the reasons why France did so badly later on in, for example, the Seven Years War was because Colbert,
his predecessor, has restricted immigration from France to New France.
In in Canada, the French population in Canada remained very small because it was being kept at home,
rather shortsightedly one of many reasons why North America speaks English and not, for the most part, French.
Other examples overseas in Japan, which I haven't got time to go into.
The modern world brings a different problem.
Then, of course,
the problem is balancing the forces which led to population decline against population growth in any condition where fertility was natural,
family planning was was effectively unknown and unpractised except by some elites.
Nowadays, because of the demographic transition,
the two centuries of population growth unleashed by the kind of the death rate in the 18th and 19th centuries
is now coming to an end with the wider and wider and wider application of family planning within marriage,
the reduction of fertility, the bringing your birth rates and death rates back into equilibrium, but at much lower levels, of course, than previously.
This was the case bringing in its trained population ageing inevitably with severity,
depending upon the level of the birth rates primarily, and also the prospect of population decline.
This prospect really caused a great deal of concern in the governments and chancelleries of Europe by the first few decades of
the 20th century and provoked a great outpouring of a rather new modern kinds of encouragements to fertility and discouragement,
to family planning of a kind, some of which were were only possible in the 20th century.
This is these are the kind of graphs which caused concern.
On the left, you can see the TFR and also the computer family size in France from 1875 to 1976.
If you see the scale very easily with this chart, this is 1975 is nine hundred nineteen hundred and twenty five.
Nineteen fifty nine seventy five. This is a tale of two or three.
As you can see in France, the period rate has dipped down even before the First World War by about 1913 to about just about two point three,
which is about replacement rate after the First World War, during which, of course, it felt very low levels, it fell down further to to lower levels.
And that provoked a concern which in the French case had been a very longstanding dating, of course, from the time when France prematurely,
as it were introduced on a national scale, reduction in the birthrate back in the day at the end of the 18th century.
Here is the parallel graph, almost paragraph of Germany, 1921, 1931, 1941, a TFR one point five two.
So falling below replacement back by the 1930s due to quite a severe degree and then following
a rather uneven roller coaster pattern ever since or centred around just about two,
but at the present time well below it.
This generated a great outburst of population projections, a technique, of course, not available to Augustus or Jean-Baptiste Colvard,
but it was possible with the development of demographic statistics to work out what the consequences would be using
the cohort component method or other simpler methods of population projection implied by these very low birth rates.
On the left, there are three projections produced by Dr. Enid Charles in the 1930s, which gained very wide publicity.
This is a population projection of the population of England and Wales,
given the continuation of the then birth rate, which is slightly below replacement but not very much.
As you can see, it preserved a population of about 40 million, up to two thousand and twenty five or so.
The population is up here somewhere. So it's not grossly out given the areas nor in population projections.
This assumes the continuation of the rate of decline then apparent, and this assumes an even more severe decline,
which has taken the population down, as we see, to about nine or ten million people.
The first times might please the Green Party. It probably will not please anybody else.
And, of course, would imply quite colossal levels of population ageing,
which curiously enough, although no doubt was not the main focus of concern at the time,
the main focus of concern at the time, despite knowledge of population ageing and predictions of it,
was within the kind of numbers, not in changes in the age structure.
And here we've got a similar projection for Germany around the same time.
So. Now, the continuation of the then level of fertility, which would keep German population from a high level, as you see,
about 70 million declining slowly and at the then current rate of fertility decline,
which should take it right down to a much lower level, as you see on the dotted line.
By the time we get to the 1930s, net reproduction rates have generally in all these countries fallen below one, as you know,
imply that were that to continue given a stable population, age structure, that the population would would grow or decline.
But by that coefficient over the course of one generation, let's say, 28 years.
So even in Australia, a country with normally a fairly robust birthrate generally is less than one, implying the population will be 96 percent,
the present size in all the then present size in generations time, England, Wales, down to nought point seventy six.
Germany, nought point nine. France, but no point nine point ninety three point eight, even as the states nought point nine.
As I probably said far too often in the past. Very important to realise that low birth rates were achieved back in the 1930s and are nothing new.
And we are very much deluded, I think,
by the disturbing bulge of the baby boom of the 1960s and also by the fact that so many series of data start in 1960
right at the top of the boom and don't incorporate because they weren't collected properly data from the 1930s,
which gives one a much more accurate picture of when low fertility was achieved.
And and of course, at a time when really very high proportions of population was already practising family planning on a reasonably effective level,
even though it was mostly cause interruptus, plus some barrier methods like the condom, the Dutch cap and other things of that kind of pill,
the IUD injectables all still lay in the future in the 1960s and later.
Well, we should deal with that later on, and that, too, here is a recent pessimistic projection,
even out pessimistic those of England, Wales and France and Germany.
This is a population projection for Japan, which you can see on an official Japanese website,
the website of the National Institute for Social Security and Population Research.
It goes a rather ambitiously long period of time and adopts an exceptionally pessimistic view as to the future level of the Japanese birthrate.
This assumes the continuation of the approximately contemporary Japanese TFR one point three four and
expectation of life at birth of about 90 or something of that kind and no migration on migration.
This is very important in Japan is assume that will continue to be the case.
This scale here shows that the population size that scale, their chosen portion of the population in different age groups,
at the risk of being to the tactic, perhaps I should remind you that what this graph shows us,
amongst other things, is the way in which low fertility generates a new population age structure and then holds it constant,
whereas at the same time it leads to a constant reduction in population size.
This dark grey hair is a portion of the population aged over 65.
As you can see, it increases to. Thirty five percent of the population, but by the century, dropping down from a rather for about 20 percent or so,
but then it remains constant, as you would expect, of constant birth rates.
Constant death rates give you a constant population structure. Even if it's an aged one, it doesn't go on getting worse and worse and worse.
This is the population here aged under 15. This is the working age population.
I mean, it's constant forever, but the numbers of people go on fooling with this other person's birth rate,
inevitably starting off at about 130 billion or so at the present time.
By the time we get to twenty one hundred. It's down to about 55 million.
By the time the next century, it's down to to about 12 or 13 million.
And that's only about two thousand three hundred or so. The last Japanese emerges.
And when the last Japanese departs, that's the end of the Japanese population.
It's fantasy. I think it's fantasy.
And I don't believe for one moment the Japanese GFR remain at one point three, four, four, two hundred and fifty or three hundred years.
Nonetheless, that's the implication.
And that's a reflection, I suppose one might say, of the kind of gloom which pervades Japanese population outlooks,
which, despite quite low birth in Germany, does not pervade German outlooks.
Anything like so much is much more cheerful about the prospect of of decline.
I think it's a generalisation that is the case in Japan, even though they both entered declined around about the same time.
The population ageing pattern you're familiar with on the left is the is the sequence of the
Australian population structure from 1875 up here to 2050 down here for Christmas tree to coffin.
And that's on a percentage basis. It doesn't illustrate production in population size.
Here is the population of west of Germany.
Both of Germany's put together showing both population ageing and population size reduction.
Because this is graphing actual numbers and not just percentages, as is the case that this is 1997.
Almost the present day is 2025, 2050 and has two thousand one hundred.
And you can see that not only. Is the population ageing, particularly as the baby boom moves into retirement, but not just for that reason,
primarily because of the progressive reduction of cohort size as a as a sub replacement facility for longer and longer,
longer developing a of confidence profile, as in the case of Austria, but also getting narrower and narrower and narrower.
So eventually it will it'll eventually get so narrow if projected on the same kind of timescale as in Japan and become nothing at all.
This does illustrate the reduction in the population size projected by the end of the century compared to it's much more healthy looking at size,
if not shape, in 1997. That I think we can skip over as a consequence of all of this, particularly the end of the baby boom,
the population concerns of the 1930s have somewhat re-emerged in all the more you know,
the better informed circumstances in Europe, in the post-war world in the 1970s, 1980s and up to the present day compared with the 1930s.
This map of United Nations shows the proportion of of European countries expressing in the UN's regular
survey whether or not they were concerned about the level of of fertility or not in their populations.
The dark areas are those countries which were which expressed concern about the fertility level and considered to be too low back in 1975.
As you can see, only France, Finland and one or two countries down here expressed concern.
The rest were more or less satisfied, not surprisingly, because still in the 1970s, birth rates were roughly the level of replacement,
if only slightly below as 2005, when cyberspace and fertility is is a universal except for Iceland, concern is very much more widespread,
not so much in Scandinavia and in the U.K., where birth rates remain quite close to replacement level,
but even including France quite irrationally because the French birth rate then was about one point nine, something is now two point nought.
No reason for concern in France, but from France's heritage on population matters is much more finely tuned and one might even say neurotic
in respect of fertility and population size than is the case in almost all the other countries in Europe.
These are the origins of the French demographic concern, France, as you know,
was the first country in Europe where national level reductions in the birthrate arising out of the use of parity,
specific family planning was first detected in the parish registers of the 72,
70s and the 70s and 80s by no means across the whole country, but in important areas of the country and in rural areas importantly,
as well as in urban areas, very slowly to begin with and then increasing in power as time went on.
Even then, that caused concern amongst the elite, amongst the clergy, by the government concerned.
The peasants, as it were, were doing their duty in producing a population for France.
And it went on throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century with the consequence that France lost its demographic pre-eminence,
as you see, in eighteen hundred French population. Twenty nine million.
It was bigger than any other aggregate in Europe, apart from European Russia, European Russia was,
although in some parts modernised thanks to the efforts of Peter the Great and Catherine and other emperors,
was still a very shambolic, disorganised kind of country, not capable of putting up the same kind of effort.
Certainly not economic and certainly not military compared with with with France.
The Russian victory over France in the War of 1812 was due to General Winter,
much more than two General Kutuzov compared to Germany at that time, although quite substantial, was not unified.
The Reich didn't arise until 1871. Germany was about three hundred and fifty different states, principalities, bishoprics,
electorates and whatnot, quite incapable of unification and not a rival to France in the world.
Nine million. Very important to keep that in mind when thinking about history. If ever you do that.
As I said before, if I've been told 40 years or 50 years ago, it was did I did a level about this disparity in population size.
So much of history would have made more sense why it was that in order to fight the French, Britain had to gang up,
apparently so unfairly with the Russians, the Prussians, the Austrians or anybody else to hand in or to fight the French.
Reason was that the tremendous pre-eminence of French numbers, also French economy,
French military power, the concentration of power by the French state,
the the capacity by Louis the 14th hundred years earlier to to field armies of hundred thousand men unrivalled in Europe,
but, of course, bankrupting to France and generally thought to be one of the reasons why the French Revolution arose.
As a consequence, the pressure of persistently high taxation, that's a different story anyway.
By the end of that century, population had gone up about 11 or 12 million other populations that had grown much more rapidly.
France had lost its pre-eminence.
It was eclipsed by its neighbours, especially by Germany, now unified even more so by by 1940, by the French population.
That hardly increased at all. And Germany's was still increasing very powerfully.
The concern about the French population reinforced by the defeat by the Germans in 1870.
Seventy one by the by the near defeat in the First World War by being overrun and indeed defeated in the Second World War.
Consequently, for all sorts of reasons, many of them really quite rational of a concern for for population.
Therefore, I'll talk about three examples of of of historical development,
of of population policy and family policy before moving on to the modern manifestation of that in the present time.
I think they are quite, quite interesting.
Important to realise is that the policies adopted by France and by other countries before the Second World War
were operating on a different model of family structure and family welfare than is the case at the moment.
Before the Second World War, married women, for the most part, were not in the workforce.
The highly important variable of opportunity cost, which is featured so, so much in our analysis of the underlying reasons for fertility.
Changes in fertility differentials didn't exist when women were not in the workforce, married women were not in the workforce.
You couldn't have opportunity costs. The focus of family policy and population policy was very much more to do with compensating families
conceived in a male breadwinner model for the direct costs of children for the cost of the food,
the clothing education has to be paid for and all the rest of it.
Therefore, with wage supplements and and other kinds of incentives,
a very straightforward cash basis is only half after the war that family policies had to be developed.
First of all, family policies which got away from the then totally discredited paternalism of the of the pre-war period,
but also which took into account the increasing contribution that women made to the family budget,
the rise of the problem of opportunity, cost of having children, given the initial anyway,
incompatibility of being in the workforce at the same time as bringing up a family.
French foreign policy, as I mentioned, dates back for a long period of time and accentuated after 800 or so once once the effect
of the adoption of family planning started to bite in terms of population statistics.
This was manifested in Napoleon's marriage law, which encouraged marriage.
Even even the cost of diminishing the armed forces amounts to double the crude marriage rate and increase the birth rate by 10 percent.
Only transiently, I think. But it was interesting that it's one of the very first examples of a population policy,
a family policy which has had some measurable, measured results.
By the time we get to the end of the 20th in the 19th century,
we have all kinds of popular organisations springing up out of national patriotic concern
to pressure groups really to to promote the notion of the problem that France was in and to
press the government and also press private industry and other organisations to do something
to support the wage of of workers so that they could continue to afford having children.
The earliest national small population, France is founded in 1896, still exists, as I will show you in a moment.
And if you're concerned about the French birthrate, you can send in some money. By the time you get to the First World War,
the family allowances to compensate families for the cost of children were already costing about 20 percent of GDP in France.
It was that important and starts to impinge on national finances that strongly.
One of the characteristics of the pre-war period and not in the post-war period, except in communist countries,
is the restriction on on means of family planning, both in France and in Germany and also in the Soviet Union.
In 1920, laws were passed to outlaw abortion and outlaw contraception and impose really quite severe
penalties on those selling or promoting or distributing contraceptives and also French abortions,
all practical purposes made strictly illegal with severe penalties for the transgresses.
Those laws hung on until way into the post-war period.
It wasn't until 1967 that the law against contraception was repealed, not not till 1970 for or against abortion was repealed.
By that time, of course, most French women were were. Practising family planning,
just like everybody else in Western Europe and and lots of French women were having abortions even though they were by definition, illegal.
And one of the one of the propaganda coup which led to the lower veil,
which led to the repeal of the abortion law, was the fact that a large number of French celebrities,
actresses, female politicians and others got up in public and said, we have all had abortions, we have all broken the law.
This law is absurd. It has to go after that.
It was inevitable that the law did go.
One small hangover from that, of course, was the fact that the French colonies in West Africa and elsewhere all inherited French domestic legislation.
And some of this legislation has persisted much longer than in metropolitan France.
In recent years, we still have a minister devoted to population,
even though with the with the with the robust French birthrate over the last 30 or 40 years,
it's been much less necessary to worry about it nonetheless. Generally speaking, when when French presidents come to power, Giscard, this guy was one.
Mitterrand was another. Chirac was another. They all make a point in their early speeches of emphasising the importance
of population for France and how France faces a future for serious problems.
Europe, the bomb, the economy and population has always included.
Whether Sarkozy has done so, I don't know. And the policy continues at quite a high level.
In 2003, just one example, a one billion euro scheme to to keep the birthrate up,
even though it is already a very robust is the highest in mainland Europe at about two point three and somewhat higher than Britain,
somewhat higher than Scandinavia. And in 2006, interestingly enough,
there was concern arose over with a faint echo of the concerns of the pre-war period
to do with who was having the babies in the pre-war period in Britain and elsewhere.
There was considerable concern because of the pattern of the adoption of family planning.
The people who were educated and well off were having rather few babies, those who are less educated and less well off having more babies.
This was thought to be financially and also possibly intellectually impoverishing to the country.
Those concerns evaporated for the most part after the Second World War.
In France, they have been revived. A tax incentive in 2006 is clearly focussed on higher earning couples.
But it would seem as as a consequence of concern that higher,
higher educated women in France were not having enough children and too much of the new generation came from the lower educated and the poor.
This is one of the medals. Just for your information, the medal Donatella family often says, is used in 1920.
You have an awful lot of children to get one. As you see gold medal, you had to have eight, even a bronze four or five.
But you can still get one of these medals. If you go to France and not French citizenship and have lots of babies,
you can apply to the military and put forward these medals and wear them on Bastille
Day and other national holidays as a mark of your democratic demographic merit.
Here is the reason. A recent bit of propaganda from the Alliance Nacionale and some of you would have read the wonderful book on
the demographic transition by Jean-Claude Juncker is one of the five luminaries whose signature is on this.
The idea of national still exists, although really with a TFR of two point nought three,
you thought that he could possibly decide his job is done and pack up.
But there it is. One of the curious by-products of French President Nicolas concern was arising out of the activities of various national and various
other pressure groups was the way that France was swamped in the early years of the 20th century before the First World War,
particularly with lots and lots of pronated. This propaganda in the form of these postcards,
these were these were produced in very large numbers and people would send them to each other as a normal means of correspondence.
Here are some examples.
Um, yeah, this one dates to 908, as you can see from when you can pick them up for a couple of euros in French provincial markets.
In those great stores, they have full of photographs and postcards. And so the message is extremely simple, but it's to increase baby consciousness.
Here are masses of babies forming over some sort of farmyard here.
A lot of babies in the traditional cabbage patch.
These are cabbages sitting it and they're always saying, I will bring you happiness, I will be faithful, I will be loyal,
etc. This one saying I will be gay, which is perhaps not quite the message which was intended at the time.
And this extended into the 1950s that you can see it as it is extremely first postcard here.
And here's a helicopter clearly post Second World War, early vintage 1950s helicopters,
the parachute parachuting all these babies onto an unsuspecting and defenceless French population.
Also, this is a helicopter of happiness providing with babies.
The message is a simple one, but but constant repetition does help here.
Here are some more babies in a top hat and being pulled out of a hat like rabbits.
The stork you on the top left babies all over the sunflower seeds and more stalks on the right and so on and so forth.
This produced a back. Some of you may read the works of elevator bras, a very notable, very distinguished French demographer,
highly amusing, very mischievous, who wrote this sensational book.
Marianne Marianne, as you may know, is the symbol of the French Revolution.
And her statue stands outside the armoury in every little town in France and also stands outside the
mayor's office and says Inhorn Road with some of you may have may have passed by from time to time.
Anyway, here is Marianne, wearing a revolutionary cap and heavily pregnant.
And Marianne part refers to the fact that the farmers have had a brass is concerned.
The INED, the National Institute for the Study of Population is pulling rabbits out of a hat and misleading the French public.
French intellectuals, as you know, tend to be much more excited about everything than the intellectuals in England,
insofar as we have intellectuals in England at all,
and in France, where I think the centre of intellectual thought rather more left wing, perhaps that is the case in Britain.
Questions of controversy and questions of population are highly controversial.
There is a strand of French demographic, another opinion which feels that that concern about population is misplaced, that it's fascist,
or that it emphasises the power of the state that is concerned too much with numbers of people possibly with somewhat racist overtones.
And other liberals was accusing the director of INED for which he worked at the time of falsifying with other colleagues the
demographics of France in order to promote protectionist policies which he felt were and still feels were all completely wrong.
I forgot to mention that this is this is this has is given added resonance by the fact that ined the answer to National Day,
to the demographic of France and Ensay,
which is the French National Physical Office, were both founded under Vichy France under the aegis of collaborationist Vichy.
France under German direction, might have inherited, even to this day, a slight pull of of of fascism as far as the left wing France is concerned.
And that's the continuing a continuing fallout, if you like, from the Second World War and from the Vichy France period of 1940 to 44.
Germany, I didn't want to go into the detail, somewhat similar pattern to France with family allowances and and also, interestingly enough,
in the new Social Democrat government after the fall of the German empire, the departure of the Kaiser after the First World War,
liberalisation of abortion liberalisation not tightening up this time for for for human what we now call human rights reasons for female liberation,
reasons to liberate women from from the burden of excessive childbearing, rapidly reversed,
of course, by Nazi policy in 1933, by which time the birth rate had fallen to low levels.
The Nazis were very anti Malthusian, as you might imagine, curious enough, did not outlaw contraception.
In that respect. The policy was milder than that of the French.
But they did encourage marriage very much with a policy which just possibly may have been effective in the policy
which they adopted was to give marriage loans to people who got married in Germany after they came to power in 1933.
Those managed loans were conditional on the young woman leaving the workforce and and staying at home.
But those loans were cancelled on the production of successive numbers of children.
So they became gifts rather than loans. This became very expensive, but nonetheless something or other possibly that possibly rearmament,
possibly other policies led to a quite an important jump in the birthrate in a moment.
All that came to an end, of course, in 1945 and for the next 30 years in Germany, for quite understandable reasons,
became almost impossible to talk about population and particularly to talk
about fertility and especially to talk about the need to increase fertility,
even when the birthrate in Germany remained resolutely below replacement rate from the early 1970s onwards,
and when it was quite clear that rather severe levels of population, ageing and population design a decline in prospect.
It took about.
Thirty years for this powerful effect of the Nazi experience to wear off and for it to become possible for German politicians and others to raise
the issue of the low birth rates in public and to raise the question of whether there might not be quite sensible to to change policies in Germany,
which appeared to be hostile to to to producing children, hostile to large families and and reverse them.
This is now much more out in the open is now a positive government policy to increase the birthrate by means of family friendly policies put forward,
of course, as in almost all post-war policy, as meeting the gap of unmet need,
which is apparent from the gap between the repeatedly reported preference of women to have at least two children,
which is pretty much the case in Germany,
as in most other countries, contrasting with the actual performance of a birth rate equivalent to about one point three,
one point for children, which is the case in Germany. These policies are presented, I think,
not unreasonably there and elsewhere as removing the obstacles which prevent women having the number of children which they want.
Easier said than done, but in theory, that's the idea. I visited a number of those here.
And this is this is done. Well, first of all, first of all, here is a German demographic trends that I was talking about.
You can see in 1933 when the Nazis came to power,
the yellow highlighted group birthrate had dropped to fourteen point seven and then increased somewhat after that.
And in a way which some have attributed to to the policy of which I described earlier about marriage loans and their cancellation.
My supervisor, David Glass, feels that this is the only reasonably likely.
Evidence of effectiveness of family policy in pre-war Europe and glass being Jewish
is not likely to want to look with favour on the policies of the German Nazi regime.
This is a sort of example which we're getting from Germany at the moment,
these glamorous ladies on the left are the German ministers responsible for family planning.
For some reason, British female ministers do not like this, but in Germany, they just do things better on the right.
That is not a German minister of family, but it's just part of a campaign.
We also followed by a German MEP to bear their bump in public in order to kind of promote as well pregnancy awareness and get
rid of the embarrassment which is associated with with with reproduction and pregnancy and all the rest in the Soviet Union.
The third example of a family policy after after the First World War,
the Soviet Union started off turning society upside down and all sorts of ways
in one way be the first country in the world to introduce abortion on demand,
sweeping away all the old religious prohibitions and legal prohibitions on abortion and permitting abortion on demand.
There was a sort of self-serving motive for that.
One of the consequences of the of the revolution in Russia, especially in urban areas, was enormous.
Outpouring for Enron were an enormous relaxation of sexual morality such that large numbers of young girls becoming pregnant.
This, in Lenin's view, was interfering with production and impeding the construction of socialism.
And one of the reasons for the for this introduction of abortion was not just
liberal policy with communist states tend to do anyway for for liberal reasons,
but also to to calm down this outpouring of births outside marriage to young girls, many of whom were not capable of supporting them.
By the time we get to the 1930s and the birthrates really fallen quite low.
All this is reversed and this is very typical of communist regimes.
Is that the in circumstances where family planning remains primitive, as it did in pre pre-war Soviet Union, as it did in post-war communist Europe,
abortion remain a front line method of family planning, such that even in the 1980s,
the average Russian woman would have two lifetime pregnancies producing children and six abortions by lifetime.
The ratio of abortions of birth was well over one to one in most communist countries until until the 1980s,
wartime brought taxes on single and childless medals, of course,
very much on the German pattern that is in the corner and very much up and down policy until the end of communism and
all the incentives for family in a population where women taking population was thought to be particularly important,
partly for workforce reasons, all that collapsed and the birthrate went down, it's now going back up again.
Whether it is to do with these recent initiatives promoted by by Putin and Medvedev,
this is one where the state is going to pay couples sixty, sixty pounds a month for a third child and every subsequent baby.
Really quite modest stuff, but also more bizarrely promising land for babies in a country of most mostly living in cities,
which is not really like if you go to Siberia and start playing up bits of tundra.
And nonetheless, that's that's what's done. And here's here's another fate, which seems to me of Nazi authoritarianism.
This is Nashi, the nationalist youth movement supported by Mr Putin and his great supporters with these outdoor camps.
It was a suggestion in the newspaper of what was accompany this picture that they were
encouraged as they were to go out and get on with it in the hope of pushing up the birthrate.
How far that's happened, I don't know. But the TFR has certainly increased in Russia now to one point five.
This may well be a consequence of some of these cash bonuses for for marriage and child bearing, which Putin and his colleagues introduced.
These, however, tend to have whenever their trade affects primarily on temper rather than quantum, of which are transient and don't and don't last.
This is just an example of some of the numerous but probably ineffectual measures taken by provincial governments in all sorts of parts of Europe,
all the way from Norway to Italy to try and stop their provincial rural population decline.
You can't read it.
It's just saying that in the town of Skoch start, the the local government has given all its female employers employees a day off to go and romp in.
A bomb is not told if they're given forty male employees permission to romp in the barn as well.
If if they haven't, then it's going to be a progressive occasion, but not a very productive one.
And that one feels. To cut the cattle, can all this work?
Does it work? Can policy affect family formation?
That's the fundamental question that we have to ask about. There are lots of problems in sorting this out.
One of the problems is that when modern states spend up to 50 percent of GDP and influenced by their policies,
the provision and cost of health, of education, of housing and almost anything else you can imagine,
many of these things plausibly affect the rational decisions upon both union formation and the production
of children in ways which are very difficult to measure because so many influences are happening at once,
possibly of a contradictory matter.
Very important, therefore, to remember that unintended effects of policy, as in so many other areas of the national life,
may be just as important as intended ones in affecting union formation and and birth rates, generally speaking,
in family policies which are which were initially introduced almost entirely for welfare reasons,
without any hint of unpleasant paternalism, which now increasingly incorporated some hope that it might increase the birthrate.
As well as protecting people and families and children in poverty, the demand for children is assumed be axiomatic for the most part.
That is to say that it is taken seriously when people women keep on saying time and time again that they want to have at least two children.
Therefore, from that is for an unmet need, as it were, for childbearing caused by an unsatisfied unmet need,
caused by all sorts of impediments which policy might possibly ameliorate or remove altogether.
And this this is a list of of some of the areas, the pressure points of policy, as it were, which are addressed by these these policies.
Money cost directly and, of course, increasing of the opportunity cost, trying to bridge the gap which has arisen,
the incompatibility which has arisen when women have moved into the workforce
between having babies on the one hand and being the workforce on the other.
An area where Scandinavia seems to have been particularly active and and successful time costs in terms of parental leave,
job protection for women who take time off to have children that wish to go back into the workforce or to be rather important,
all sorts of other burdens on on women. Other policies are well worth a mention are those which affect tempo with most of the
policies are concerned with insofar as a demographically focussed are concerned with.
Increasing family size in the long run is also a case, of course, increasing family size in the short run,
partly to counteract population ageing and to give some some breathing space for other policies to develop.
Both candidates and Vegard Skarbek are very keen on the notion of of starting
helping families to start off earlier by means of a number of policies affecting,
for example, tertiary education, reflecting on the fact that in some continental countries, many of them,
tertiary education drags on for almost a decade into the late 20s and 30s as as.
Candidates for examination can take time off from university, haven't got to attend regular tutorials or anything of that kind,
but interspersed education with periods of of low level employment, partly to pay their way and pay their costs.
This drags out that period of time before they're in a position to enter the
labour market on a regular basis and start a union formation and a family.
So tertiary education policy reform, shortening and making more condensed.
This period of education is thought to be one possible and just for kick starting an increase in the birthrate.
This is the evidence for the for the the. Axiomatic assumption that women keep on wanting to have children.
This is Eurobarometer in 2001.
This is the average stated ideal family size in all cases over two except for two, which have broken ranks, Austria and Germany.
This caused considerable suffering, the dovecote when it first came out, because it was it was an indication that this axiomatic assumption,
which has been true for the previous 30 years, enquiry enquiries,
when all the time of these enquiries made the women keep kept on saying they want to have these two children.
This was ceasing to be true.
If that seems to be true, then the underpinning of all the policies directed towards meeting unmet need would start to crumble.
However, by 2006, Germany had popped back up to an ideal family size were two, leading only Austria out in the cold, as it were, with less than two.
That, of course, may simply, in your mind, probably rightly point to the fragility of this kind of enquiry of ideal family size.
Nonetheless, is given consistent results. Even if the interpretation of the data may not be all that obvious.
There's a considerable relationship between total fertility and births outside marriage.
This is not normally mentioned as a kind of policy aspect.
Nonetheless, it is an empirical fact that it is only those countries where quite a developed world.
I mean, we are quite a high proportion of births outside marriage, which also have a reasonably protective levels of total fertility.
In other words, in order, as you'll see here, in order to have a TFR of over one point seven, which Peter McDonald and others feel,
this is about the lowest you can have and protect yourself from the most severe levels of future population ageing.
You've got to have empirically at least 30 percent this year of births outside marriage.
That is not in itself enough, because over here you've got lots of countries where 30 percent or more births outside marriage,
but were nonetheless a TFR is less than one point seven, mostly in Eastern Europe, but also including including Germany.
Nonetheless, it is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.
And there are no countries where the proportion of births within marriage is high and TFR is high within the developed world,
except for Montenegro, which I removed because it is inconvenient and it is so small, it doesn't really matter and very backward.
And the TFR is going down by the fast.
The pattern of policy is very much follows the kind of pattern of social welfare according to the classification of Espin Anderson,
which may be familiar to you. The details need not concern is very much the explicit active of prenatal isn't worth a
mention because this is usually something which is only possible in totalitarian regimes.
That is to say, the kind of restrictions on abortion and contraception,
which one which one saw in pre-war Europe and and the control of which one are extending right until the end of the Soviet period in 1989.
Propaganda and prises and and and punishments on bachelors and spinsters.
These belong to a non-democratic realm of policy and are not nowadays an issue.
The issue is one of the big contrasts resides between those areas where it is still believed using,
as it were, a male breadwinner model of the family,
that cash bonuses are the way forward to compensate for the costs of of children and those which take the view, as in Scandinavia,
in France and elsewhere,
that what is really important is the relation between women and the workforce and time budgets and not just cash and not even primarily cash,
but the question of trying to combine all desirable aspects of life in a child centred and child friendly environment.
And very likely it is the issues, the child friendly political culture at the end of the day, which makes the difference.
But introducing a child friendly political culture in a different kind of culture means really turning the
national policy and the national culture upside down in a way and is extraordinarily difficult to do.
The methodology for calculating the effectiveness of family planning policies has only really been developed over the last 15 or 20 years,
is much less well developed than that relating to the effectiveness of family planning policy in Third World countries to bring the birthrate down.
Here are some some results. On the whole, they're not terribly encouraging.
Agouti and Hatzius made a major international comparison of family policies across the developed world,
with the European developed world looking at all the policies towards encouraging women into the workforce cash bonuses, tax reliefs,
maternity leave, paternity leave and all of us all maternal,
they get their hands on and recommend a 25 percent increase in costs of those policies only generated as an extra one tenth of a child,
in fact, slightly less than one tenth of a child.
These international comparisons tend to produce very low discouraging results and point of view of policy analysts.
This may be, of course, because in order to make international comparisons, you've got to get comparable data from a large number of countries,
which may not be may not be available in comparable form and therefore all sorts
of things which may well affect the motivations for using information like,
for example, housing policy, a characteristic left out of these.
They focus rather more on measurable cash benefits,
measurable measures to do with with the labour market and return to work and and compensation for Type four income lost.
And that's only a small part of all the policies which may well affect the rationality of childbearing, single study, single countries.
That is maybe better, according to a number of people who know and understand.
Others feel this quite strongly,
those who say looking at the time trend of the birth rate over time in in relation to the inception and ending of particular policies,
the removal of particular legal institutional obstacles to to to childbearing and family formation and all rest,
that tends to produce rather more favourable results for family policy, but still not overwhelmingly positive ones.
As as MacDonald insists, what really seems to matter is the consistent long term across the board,
family effectiveness or otherwise of policies contrasting Scandinavia and France on the one hand
with the two thousand one point nine or two with those with with the much more family oriented,
cash benefit based policies of Southern Europe and East Asia, where TFSA at one point three,
one point two, if somehow you could import Scandinavian attitudes,
Scandinavian law, Scandinavian history, as it were, into those areas,
then then then you have a very different birthrate probably, but you have a different country.
And that kind of transformation is really beyond the power of policy. It seems.
What Gaultier thinks is that there's a huge difference, therefore, between what you could do and what you.
What you are doing,
the actual international measured TFR gap between the highest and lowest countries is about nought point eight of a child, about two.
And one point to the actual the actual gap in preferences compared with the
declared preferences and the actual performance is about half a child policy.
A window of opportunity seems to be about just nought point to nought point two, according to go to is very wide ranging.
Analysis seems to be about the maximum benefit. You seem to be able to get out of specific policies which actually have been introduced.
At the end of the day, therefore, most policies do fail or have certainly not been spectacularly successful,
particularly those which focussed solely on throwing money at women in the hope the babies will will eventually emerge.
And Young, whom I think sums up things quite well in this statement here,
and possibly Heather Jocie even better by simply saying that if you look after the interests of women, then population will look after itself.
And this is very important to for those countries which adopt a rather patriarchal attitude towards them, towards marriage,
reproduction of women and all the rest need to keep very firmly in mind in southern Europe and particularly in the Far East.
And the I shall end the business of the reproduction of the country and its future population size very much lies with your generation.
So very interesting to see what you decide to do about it. And I shall sit back and not give any more lectures on this and see what happens.
Thank you all very much.