It is Going to Take a Long Time to Get Out of Population Decline – Interview with Paul Morland

Dr. Paul Morland in Budapest

 

Dr. Paul Morland is one of Britain’s leading demographic experts. His book The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World explains how periods of rapid population transition shaped the course of history. We caught up with him during the Mathias Corvinus Collegium’s “Carry the fire, or why do we need children?” symposium held in Budapest.

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30 years ago we were all drafting doomsday scenarios because of projected population explosion fears, now we are struggling with the opposite. How did we get this so wrong, and how come no one was able to predict the demographic and social decline of developed societies?

I think 30 years is wrong. 50 years ago was when we last thought that the population was growing fast. If you look at the big growth in the populations in many countries, it was in the 60s. In Britain, we went through sub-replacement fertility, that is, fewer than two children per woman, just over 50 years ago. We should have started worrying about it then. Subsequently, we saw this trend spreading really quickly. It was not just a white European problem, we saw it happening in Japan, in China, in the decade before the one child policy, which they started introducing in the early 80s. However, in the 70s we saw the fertility rate in China falling roughly from six to three. With this they were still fairly high. In poor countries – and China was then quite a poor country – we were seeing their fertility rates drop very quickly. Therefore, 30 years ago, number 1: we should have seen this trend spreading, number 2: we should have actively done something about it. But there is a trouble with the public – their understanding lags behind research. Hence one thing I am trying to do is to raise awareness of this. I have friends like Lord Frost or Neil O’Brien, they are aware of the stats concerning population decline, but if you go up the ranks, if you go to the mainstream, then many still think it is 1965.

The other problem is once you get below-replacement fertility, you can still keep growing for quite a long time, because for a period after that you still have relatively few older people dying, and lots of young women just not having many children. In Britain, we went sub-replacement in 1972-73. The first year that we had more deaths than births was last year, save COVID. It takes a long time to go from below-replacement fertility to translating it into falling population. But once you get there, it is going to take a long time to get out of.

 

Experts often declare the determining factor behind this decline to be the number of children that young women want. It appears as though volition is a decisive issue here.

 This is a crisis of demographic fertility, not biological fertility.

So why is that happening? Modernity conspires against high fertility. Urbanization – people in towns do not want so many children, because they do not have enough space, they can only invest in a smaller amount of children, so they can get returns out of a smaller number, as opposed to the many children in the past, who have resulted in more hands in the fields, for instance. Also, women are better educated, they are having careers, their aspirations are growing.

The question is how low the fertility can go. If it goes from six to two or three, then it can be a good thing. The problem is that modernity which thrives in low fertility, can get filtered through a culture, and what the nature of a particular country’s culture is will be important here. As an example, I compare two developed cultures at the extreme opposites of the demographic path. In Israel, the average woman has three children. In South Korea, the average woman has 2/3 of a child. What is the difference? Is it because Israeli women are less educated or they cannot get contraception, or because they are not ambitious? No, these are both modern societies; they are all suffering and benefiting from all the features of modernity.

The important factor here is what the given culture that modernity is filtered through looks like. In Israel, they have a culture where three children are the norm. In South Korea, they have a culture that means they have 2/3 of a child each. This means that whatever the government does in terms of helping people, if the culture is unfavorable with this regard and does not change, the government will be pushing on a closed door. The government should be pushing from its part, but we also need to do our part as a society. The government’s job in turn would be to shape our culture so as to make sure that the door is open (for those wanting bigger families).

There is trend of a flight from family, flight from marriage, and there are radical ideologies encouraging these attitudes. A drive towards self-realization where people view children as a mere inconvenience. Is this trend getting stronger, or have people now paused to look at its real-world consequences?

Culture is a slippery thing, and it is very difficult to analyze and say exactly what is causing what. I think the woke ideology is a part of this toxic mix of anti-natalism in the culture. So even if people are not specifically saying children are a bad thing, they are prioritizing a whole bunch of things other than a family or having children.

So, what can we do about that? I think we can push back on the wokery. I do not want to advocate a push back on things like women’s rights; I think we need to find a way that we can have women in the workplace with men stepping up to the plate helping with childcare. I do not want to go back to the 1950s, I do not want to say let us burn the culture down and recreate the culture we had 70 years ago. I do not think it is feasible, possible, or even desirable. I think we do need women in the workplace, but I think we need to push back on a type of feminism, for example, that says women should not have children, because women should only develop themselves in their careers.

If you actually listen to what women want, women say they want two to three children. That is very encouraging. But I agree with you that wokeness is a problem, and it is like the tip of the iceberg, the worst part of our culture. Yet there is a much bigger group, which is not necessarily extremely woke, but does not think it through carefully why it is not anti-women to encourage women to have children. We need to develop a new culture with elements of the old culture, with elements of traditional values, but not just universally say we must stop divorce or abortion. We need to find a way forward to higher fertility where people want children, which they do, and they want them enough to actually have them.

Should we accept defeat and prepare a social model for a long term demographic collapse?

The fertility rate went up in Hungary from about 1.2 to 1.6. There are sets of reasons about whether this growth is related directly to government policy or not. Of course, it has come down somewhat since we are having difficult economic times, there has been war (in Ukraine) and COVID. I think it is a long-term project.

Even if you cannot get it up to two but from one to 1.5, it is already worth the fight. I do think if policy is getting us only to a part of the way, it is still worth it. The population will slowly decline, but as it declines, the ratio of retirees and old workers will not be as bad. I do agree that we need to get it up above two children per woman, but I think we need to get pragmatic as to what we can achieve in a short period of time. If it has gone from one to 1.5, it does not mean we have not succeeded at all. If we compare it with South Korea, it could be worse. I am more optimistic in terms of the possibility of bringing the numbers up. We have seen it go up in Central Asia, we saw a post-war baby boom even in modern societies in the 50s, so I would not give up.

I am more pessimistic when it comes to saying: “should we not be preparing for this?”, because what does it actually mean? In 30 years in Japan there will be only one worker for each retiree. All the planning you are going to do is not going to mean you have the money for healthcare, for pension; there are not enough people who are going to be working in the old age care sector. We are going to abandon old people because we will simply not be able to do anything about it. Some people think technology may be the solution, but I am very skeptical about that.

Planning for it is really nice, but I do not know how you plan for a society where either the government gives up on a large section of society or it goes bankrupt.

If we are in that dark period, but fertility rates are going up, at least we have a light at the end of the tunnel.

The prevalence of anti-birth, anti-family ideologies, an obscene cult of abortion, ridiculing Christian doctrine that defines marriage as one between man and woman only, and the sanctity of human, even unborn life. Who is benefiting from these ideologies and how?

There is quite an interesting debate about where these ideas come from. Are these things deeply embedded in a sort of cosmopolitan culture? I do not want to get into that discussion because I am not an expert, but you are absolutely right to think about it. Outside of the Democratic National Convention (Chicago, August 2024), people were celebrating abortion, and then the Democrats lost. Along came (U.S. Vice-President elect) J.D. Vance talking about the importance of family, and he won. So, there is an obnoxious brew of ideologies which are working against the procreation of life, against the creation of our next generation, and against the continuation of our nations. But the game is not over. In America, pro-natal politicians have won the election, and I am optimistic for the United Kingdom, while in Hungary, your government is also trying. The tide is turning.

Flight from family is ultimately a flight from sacrifice (Nicholas Eberstadt), from all the things one has to give up if they want to dedicate their lives to raising children.

It is probably right. If you look at Israel as a society, it is very different from most Western societies. The fact that they have the highest fertility rate in the Western world is no coincidence. The one thing I would push back on though is that we need to be careful about our language, because I would say to anyone that having a child may be a sacrifice – you have said it in your own words – but it is a sacrifice with the highest payback you can possibly have as an investment in terms of having children.

Some countries see immigration as a solution to demographic decline purely on a mathematical model. But for a society to survive people must also work together, must possess a common vision for their future in order to function. This is where they have been failing miserably. The US and the UK are prime examples. What is the future of these societies with parallel values, goals?

Immigration is not a solution to this problem. Firstly, immigrants generally converge on the local fertility rate. The fact is that the people you bring in will also get old, then you have to bring in even larger numbers to replace them. Another part of the argument is that many countries are not able to have mass immigration. It is not going to be a solution to the problems of countries like China either. China is a relatively poor country, it does not have a language or a culture that attract people from high-fertility countries, and it is so big that it would have to be sucking in hundreds of millions of people to make any difference.

There is also a third argument: we cannot solve this human problem, there are too few pieces on the chess board, and the solution cannot be simply moving the pieces around.

The final argument against immigration as a solution is that even if you are the most cosmopolitan woke person with no concern about the nation, one with only a purely civic sense of nationalism, the fact that we live in democracy and the people have spoken when they voted in millions for Le Pen in France, they have spoken when they elected Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and they are also speaking in Germany as support for the AfD party is rising. You may or may not like these parties, but the people have said that they do not want mass immigration, they do not want mass ethnic change.

Ultimately we must do something about the children, it is not just stopping the immigrants; we need to have a workforce in the future, we need a higher fertility rate, we need to create our own future if we want a nation for us.

The slight drop in births in Hungary as compared to the peak numbers two years ago is conveniently used against the government by its critics. Do you see any elements of the Hungarian family support model that could offer a way out of this demographic death spiral?

It seems to have some results. For example, your marriage rates and children born within marriage has gone up in Hungary. These may be laying the foundation of future rises in the fertility rate. You need to understand that this is a long-term problem that we need to address over the long term. It should have been addressed a long time ago, at least in Britain. We need to keep trying because everything is better than surrendering. Finally, again I would stress the role of culture and what you can do to change the culture so that young people say they want children. We have to change our culture, priorities, lifestyle. I think Hungary has made a really good start on it.

Featured Image: Hungary Today