No Kidding. The problem of starting a family in a cost of living crisis.
'Social trends' often have economic origins, and the build up of debt is acting like a Malthusian positive check on population growth.
The parish registers at English churches might not sound like a particularly exciting or relevant starting point to an economic investigation into how problems with inflation and the cost of living affect decisions to get married and have children.
Yet it was in applying the techniques of ‘big data’ to these records that Professor E.A. Wrigley et al at Cambridge University put together an extraordinary picture of patterns in the ‘big’ events in household formation (births, deaths and marriages) over a period of three centuries from 1540 to 18711.
In 1538, a law was passed in England requiring all the major ecclesiastical events in people’s lives - baptism, marriage, burial - to be recorded in every parish register. This only really started to change in 1837 with the introduction of a civil registry for births, deaths and marriages.
With such a huge data set, all it would take to create a national picture of long-term trends in issues of household formation such as age of marriage, number of children, age when the first child was born and so on, was a far-sighted professor with a colleague who was good at computers.
What these parish records showed was that in the good times, the population grew as people got married younger and had more children. Times of war, pestilence and famine saw the age for getting married rise, with fewer children being born and to older mothers. In the pre-industrial (and pre-growth) world, stability was the best to be hoped for, with bad times tending to come after good times.
It was Thomas Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) who suggested that the bad times had to follow the good times for a simple mathematical reason. The good times saw the population grow at a geometric rate (ie: exponentially), while the food supply grew only at an arithmetic rate (ie: in a straight line). This mismatch meant populations, growing too fast relative to food supplies, would eventually end up declining due to a combination of positive checks (famine, war, other bad things) and also preventative checks such as celibacy, delaying marriage and so on.
Sadly for Malthus, he was writing just at the point agricultural technology and crop science saw ever higher yields and productivity from the land, ensuring that the world’s rapidly-growing population could remain fed to a reasonable level of sustenance. Yet three hundred years on, it seems that his theory might be relevant once again, although using a ‘positive check’ he probably hadn’t envisaged.
In many developed countries, the birth rate is falling. This is likely due to a number of factors, but one that seems to be gaining a lot of traction at present is the cost of living crisis, especially in relation to the cost of housing. Many young people stay in the parental home longer, delay marriage or don’t get married at all, and often can’t afford to buy a house or a flat, an act which traditionally marked the beginning of household formation and the arrival of children. This sounds a little like the preventative checks which Malthus spoke of 300 years ago.
A recent article in Canada’s National Post highlighted how the country’s 2022 fertility rate had dropped to 1.33 births per woman, well below the already record low figure of 1.57 set in 20052. The article went on to highlight a rise in immigration but also a survey that over a third of young Canadians were, “setting aside plans for a family due purely to financial reasons”, notably suitable housing. Malthus eat your heart out.
It’s not only a problem in Canada. In an article in The Sunday Times, the problem of falling fertility in Italy was highlighted in the context of a wider issue across Europe, beyond the usual concerns about an aging population3. The problem in Italy is being compounded by high youth unemployment rates. One unfortunate young man interviewed for the article summed-up the problem: “With no job contract, you can’t rent or certainly buy a house, and without that, children are unthinkable.” A similar story is repeated elsewhere in the developed world.
According to Malthus, delaying household formation and the decision to have children is a preventative check on population growth. The symptoms would seem to be low GDP growth, low growth in real wages, poor employment opportunities for the young, inflation and high house prices.
What is slightly different in this instance to Malthus’ calculus of geometric population growth versus arithmetic food supply growth is that the symptoms mentioned above can be brought together and linked to a new ‘positive Malthusian check’, that of an excess of debt. The irony is that due to the effect of compound interest, debt grows in a non-linear, geometric fashion, much in the way Malthus thought populations used to grow relative to the food supply.
With the growth of debt comes the growth of money, and while the geometric growth of money and debt due to the compounding effect of interest doesn’t have an equivalent arithmetic series against which it can be measured (per Malthus’ population vs food comparison), perennial inflation of varying levels for the last 60 years suggests that in the long-term, money has been growing faster than the productive capacity of the economy.
While Malthus thought that war, plague and harvest failure acted as ‘positive’ checks on population growth, in the twenty first century, it’s arguable that debt and monetary inflation are increasingly acting in a similar fashion. Judging by our current problems of income inequality, inter-generational wealth gaps and the inability of the young to ‘get on the housing ladder’, taken along with declining fertility in the developed world and elsewhere (notably in China, notwithstanding the effects of its ill-fated one child policy), it would suggest that our current economic and monetary system is struggling to deliver the very basic needs of society - not just growth, but stability.
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E.A. Wrigley, Population History of England 1541 -1871 - A Reconstruction, Harvard University Press, 1981.
Tristin Hopper, Canada’s birth rate has dropped off a cliff (and it’s likely because nobody can afford housing), National Post, 05/10/2023.
Tom Kington, Bambinos? No - we’re far too skint, say young Italians, Sunday Times, 29/10/2023.