A Tale Of Two Exceptions

18th-century France, 21st-century Israel and the fertility conundrum

I will lay my cards on the table up front: as with so many other topics, I’m in the mushy middle when it comes to the question of global fertility. I think rapid population growth feeds social instability, inter-group conflict and even war, and ultimately puts increasing pressure on the natural environment. I think fertility rates that are well below replacement can lead to gerontocratic societies that are decreasingly creative and dynamic, persistent economic problems due to low or negative investment returns, and, if immigration is used as a solution to the foregoing, a different kind of inter-group and generational conflict. My gut feeling is that a modest, low rate of demographic growth probably makes for the healthiest society, and that a modest, low rate of demographic decline is probably easily managed.

I’m also, historically, a real skeptic about advocates of higher fertility, and particularly those who advance cultural explanations for why so much of the world has dropped to below-replacement fertility or is rapidly dropping in that direction. The reason is that the big picture with respect to fertility says nothing about culture, but is driven by deep economic and social forces.

If you look out at the history of the last 300 years, what you see is something like the following. First, industrialization made societies wealthier, which meant they could afford more kids—populations rose. Later, medical advances reduced child mortality—populations rose faster. Those effects began first in Europe and North America, where industrialization happened first, and spread as industrialization and modern medicine spread. Fertility began to decline in a serious way only as societies began to reach a certain stage of economic development where agriculture was no longer a key employer, and declined more dramatically as societies became post-industrial. The key drivers of fertility decline are female literacy (a proxy for female education more generally) which correlates with both the desire and ability on the part of women to control their fertility, and urbanization, which drives down fertility relentlessly due to the higher cost of housing (and, historically though no longer, a higher disease burden; cities have been demographic sinks for as long as there have been cities).

That’s the big-picture argument, and it works reasonably well for most of the world. There are countries that had higher fertility before the industrial revolution really took off—like the early United States—on account of having an exceptionally low cost of land. And there are countries that achieved significant reductions in fertility while still relatively rural and relatively poor due to aggressive government policy. But overall, that development story fits the global facts quite well, whereas cultural arguments—such as the notion that religion is the major driver of fertility—do a much worse job of explaining why, for example, Poland (arguably the most Catholic country in Europe) has a total fertility rate of less than 1.4 children per woman, or why Iran (an actual theocracy) has a total fertility rate of around 1.7.

It’s true that once you reach a high level of development, some of the correlations that mattered at earlier stages cease to operate. Poverty and high inequality correlate with higher fertility at a low stage of development; at a higher stage of development, the correlation breaks down or even flips. High levels women’s workplace participation correlates with low fertility as women enter the workforce; later, once a high level of workplace participation is the norm, again the correlation breaks down or even flips. But even wealthy and egalitarian societies like Norway (TFR below 1.5) and Finland (TFR below 1.4) have experienced significant fertility declines in recent years. Meanwhile, countries that have actively tried to boost fertility, like Hungary (TFR below 1.6) or Russia (TFR 1.5) have achieved only modest success rising from very low levels, a success which may yet prove temporary.

All of the foregoing explains my baseline skepticism about the notion that we can do very much about persistently low fertility.

But I may be wrong. If someone wanted to prove I was, I’d suggest they examine two two notable exceptions to the demographic transition story, one at the beginning of the transition and one at the end. Between them, they lend some credence to the idea that cultural factors could play a larger role than I am inclined to believe they do, a large enough role that they could dominate over the economic and social forces driving the transition.

The first exception is France. Today, France has one of the highest fertility rates among highly-developed countries at a TFR of over 1.8. That’s still below replacement, but significantly above Germany (TFR a bit over 1.5) the UK (TFR under 1.6) or Italy (TFR a bit over 1.2)—or, for that matter, the United States (TFR a bit over 1.6) or Canada (TFR 1.4). But back at the start of the industrial revolution, France was a much more significant outlier in the opposite direction. Just as fertility in England began to take off thanks to industrialization, fertility in France began to decline:

And just to be clear, France is the outlier here, not England:

Guillaume Blanc, the author of the piece linked above, speculates as to why that decline—which began in the second half of the 18th century and was completed before the end of that century—might have taken place. His best guess is that it was the advance of secularization that made the difference, a cultural change that predated the French Revolution. Whether he’s right about the cause or not, the result of France settling at a lower level of fertility was that it was able to achieve levels of GDP-per-capita comparable to those in the UK in spite of industrializing slightly later, taking the demographic dividend of having fewer children to support and using it to sustain a higher level of lifestyle at a price of being a smaller country a century later than it otherwise might have been.

That’s somewhat comparable to what China accomplished in the 20th century, reducing its fertility dramatically as part of an industrialization strategy, with the result that, by the end of the 21st century, it is expected to be roughly half the size of India rather than roughly equal in size. If India is able to catch up developmentally over that same period, that will have profound consequences for world history, perhaps comparable to the differential growth rates between France on the one hand and Germany and Britain on the other hand during the 19th century.

In any event, any conclusions really are speculative at this point, but I encourage you to read the whole thing.

The other notable exception, at the other end of the historical period in question, is modern Israel.

Israel is an extremely urban country with a highly-educated population; it’s crowded, the cost of living is high, and economic competition is fierce. All of these things should mean that, at best, it would have a fertility rate like France’s. Instead, its fertility rate is nearly 60% higher:

It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary this is. Israel has a higher fertility rate than Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia or the UAE—much higher. And it’s clear where Israel’s demographic story diverged. From the early 1970s through the early 1990s, Israel followed a familiar demographic trajectory, with birth rates declining steadily as it got richer. In most countries undergoing demographic transition, that decline would have continued until it went below replacement; then, whether it stabilized near replacement or continued declining, and to what extent it experienced subsequent ups and downs, would plausibly be a function of specific economic and social factors. But Israel stabilized and even bounced up from a level well above replacement. Israel’s GDP per capita is roughly comparable to Germany’s. It’s fertility rate, though, is comparable to Egypt’s. What plausibly accounts for that difference? That’s the mystery.

Germany actually provides an interesting point of comparison. Germany's total fertility rate collapsed from about 2.5/woman in the late 1960s to under 1.5 by the mid-1970s. It bounced around below 1.5 from there through 1991, when the reunification with East Germany triggered a further deep drop to 1.25, a position from which it has since recovered to the 1.5 range. Germany’s burden of absorbing a new post-Communist population could be compared in some ways to Israel’s absorption of over 1 million Soviet Jews after the collapse of the USSR. One might reasonably have expected Israel’s TFR to decline precisely because of that massive influx—both because it would drive the cost of living up (particularly the cost of housing) and because the newcomers would themselves have lower fertility (both because they were overwhelmingly secular and because they had experienced downward mobility like their fellows who stayed behind in post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine, etc.). But the opposite happened: that’s precisely when Israel’s fertility stopped falling.

One common assertion is that Israel’s robust demographics are a consequence of higher religiosity, particularly in the Haredi or ultra-Orthodox sector, and/or that it is buoyed by the higher fertility among its Arab minority. But while those are definitely factors in the higher baseline, they are not the drivers of Israel’s robust fertility overall. Among other things, fertility in both the ultra-Orthodox and the Arab sectors has been declining; while the demographic echo means those sectors will continue to grow relative to the population as a whole, they aren’t the driver of rising aggregate fertility. In fact, the secular and “traditional” Jewish sectors (Jews who are not strictly observant and are fully integrated into modern life but who observe certain religious customs and continue to affiliate at least nominally with mainstream Orthodox Judaism) are the ones that have experienced increases in fertility over the past twenty years. Most remarkably, they have done so even as the age of first birth has risen.

I said that Israel has a GDP per capita that is roughly the same as Germany’s, but the lifestyle of the typical Israeli is less wealthy than that of the typical German citizen. Not that Israelis are in any way poor, but they are doing, effectively, the opposite of what Blanc speculates that France did in the mid-18th century or what China did in the late-20th century. They are foregoing a demographic dividend in favor of sustaining higher family sizes.

The question is how.

I don’t have an answer—I don’t think anybody does. As noted, it’s not religion, and it’s not traditional social roles; Israeli women are highly educated and participate at a very high level in the economy. Israel has a robust welfare state, but it’s not as robust as northern Europe’s. I’m disinclined to chalk it up to the conflict with the Palestinians—menaced Taiwan’s fertility rate is among the lowest on earth, as is Ukraine’s, and ethnically riven societies like Bosnia-Herzegovina and Northern Ireland have likewise fallen well below replacement. But it’s hard for me not to suspect that the high level of social solidarity in Israeli (Jewish) society, the sense that Israelis have of being part of a national project in a way that very few other peoples on earth do, has something to do with that society-wide willingness to live poorer for the sake of bigger families.

If that’s the case, then—not to end on an extremely speculative political note—it would behoove the most rabid partisans of that project who currently sit in Israel’s government to consider just what the disastrous course of action they’ve set the country on is already doing to that sense of solidarity, that sense of being part of a common project. It would be the ultimate irony if their policies, based in outright ethnic chauvinism, turned out to be the thing that finally broke the spell that has kept Israel on its unique demographic track for the past thirty years.