Fair Start Movement

Category: Population Economics & Demographics

  • Can Sub-Replacement Fertility Work? Just Ask Japan.

    Can Sub-Replacement Fertility Work? Just Ask Japan.

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    Japan now has a “birthrate czar,” Katsunobu Kato, who is tasked with urging women to become pregnant to stabilize Japan’s population at about 100 million as it falls from a current ~125 million. In 2015, Kato oversaw about 32 billion dollars of public funding to stabilize the birthrate at a sub-replacement level of 1.8 children per woman, using a variety of interventions. According to Kato, the government envisions a less populous Japan, but one where “all Japanese people and people of all ages and sexes–including those who have failed… can dream and hope to create a society heading forward.”

    Some are asking why Japan is investing so much in creating additional people rather than investing in the children and adults that are there now. When pressed, Kato cited economic growth rates as the reason for massive investment. But are there values other than economic growth rates that should also be considered? What about restoring the nonhuman world, investing more individualized attention in each child, and creating communities small enough and with enough in common for people to feel connected to one another? That sounds good to us.

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  • Singapore is Working Against Itself

    Singapore is Working Against Itself

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    Like many other countries at the Paris climate negotiations last year, Singapore promised to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Although some experts criticized those promises as insufficient, others say they are unrealistic. Singapore’s Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifl called the plan “very aggressive, very ambitious.” Singapore’s goal is to hit an emissions peak by 2030.

    “This is a huge challenge because we still need to have an economy that will support our people’s livelihood and at the same time, not produce even more emissions for that purpose,” Zulkifi said.

    But even while Singapore struggles to lower its emissions, it’s also working to increase emissions by increasing family size as it addresses what it calls a national baby shortage. What’s an alternative? Instead of pushing for larger families and working against its own climate plan and an obvious social trend towards smaller families, Singapore could be designing its family modeling around families working together to make better investments in each child. The Having Kids model can help.

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  • Large Families, Explosive Growth

    Large Families, Explosive Growth

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    “It’s a small world.”

    A video on population growth from worldpopulationhistory.org gives the old expression new meaning. Here are the facts:

    • In just about 200 years, the global population exploded from roughly 900 million people to more than 7.3 billion.
    • We are headed towards roughly 10 billion.

    But this trend of explosive growth is changing. Parents are choosing smaller families, and they’re investing more in each child. We can accelerate that trend, improve children’s well-being and equality of opportunity, and restore our environment and democracies, simply by working together.

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  • See World Population Growth Over Centuries

    See World Population Growth Over Centuries

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    An impressive GIF shows what world population looked like in 1800, 1900, and 2000, as well as what the United Nations projects for 2100. Here’s what Vox had to say about this population growth:

    Between 1900 and 2000, the size of the global population skyrocketed (from 1.7 to 6.1 billion), mostly in the developing world — Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. This reflects huge victories in global development and the spread of economic growth and technology previously reserved for Europe and North America. Once again, this has geopolitical significance: Being larger and richer gives countries more resources to draw on in international politics. We’re talking about the rise of countries like China and India today for a reason.

    Being larger and richer may seem like a benefit to nations, but what about the people actually living in them? A basic principle of international development called the demographic dividend suggests that smaller families, not growth, promote development.

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  • Growth and the Quantity-Quality Trade-off

    Growth and the Quantity-Quality Trade-off

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    A recent study suggests that with every additional child, other siblings are more likely to suffer from lower cognitive abilities, more behavioral issues, and worse outcomes later in life. This research builds on prior evidence that there is a significant trade-off between quantity and quality when it comes to family size. The “quantity-quality” trade-off, as it has been called, can have dramatic impacts throughout a child’s life, such as less education, lower earnings, and increased risk for teenage pregnancies and criminal behavior. If this is true, why are some leaders still pushing for larger families? Maybe it’s time to revisit growth policies that are designed to make infinitely “stronger” economies and nations at real costs to the people actually living in them.
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  • Mixed Messages on Climate Change & Unsustainable Growth

    Mixed Messages on Climate Change & Unsustainable Growth

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    We’re hearing mixed messages about the state of our planet and the people on it. On the one hand, census reports show that the United States, which is struggling to deal with its current carbon footprint in order to protect future generations from climate change, will become a lot more crowded in years to come. Yet some thought leaders in Washington are pushing for faster growth “because it will help us sustain our labor force” and “increase consumer demand for lots of products that young people and young adults and young householders need.” 

    Businesses may benefit in the short term from a growing supply of workers competing against each other for jobs and long lines of customers to buy their goods and services, but the long term effects are much less clear. The approach raises many questions and highlights the mixed messages we’re receiving. Doesn’t this growth make it harder to mitigate climate change, which is already a major issue? Does having more kids mean less time and energy will be invested in each child? How does crowding affect kids’ quality of life, the connection between people and their community, their connection to nature, and our ability to work together to define the future? Are we all better off, in the long run, with small families working together to invest more in each child?

    These are important questions, and they need answering. Let’s start the conversation

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  • Aging and the Economy

    Aging and the Economy

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    The news is filled with references to how smaller family sizes and the aging U.S. workforce are interfering with the supply of cheap labor that businesses have relied on for years. But as this article and graph show, it might not be accurate to say that economies are aging at all. Instead, they’re experiencing the latter effects of a population “bulge” created by the unsustainably high fertility rates of the baby boom, rates world governments intentionally tried to reduce to mitigate a host of problems. Today, we’re feeling the long-term effects of solutions to the 20th century population boom — solutions that were welcome and unavoidable.  

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  • Our Values: Population is About More Than Just Numbers

    Our Values: Population is About More Than Just Numbers

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    Recently, the New York Times reported on the need for higher birthrates in China and Europe. There is an unspoken assumption looming behind Steven Erlanger’s article, which rings alarm bells about “aging populations and not enough babies.” He assumes that healthy demographics require replacement-level fertility. But is it true? Even at current birthrates, we’ll fill our world with more than eleven billion people by 2100. Does anyone want their children to live in a world like that, given that our current population of 7.2 billion is enough to degrade our atmosphere, acidify our oceans, change our climate, and cause the mass extinction of other species? Demographics is about values as much as numbers. Assuming the need for replacement-level fertility values traditional growth economics over a cleaner, safer, and healthier future – for us and for our children.

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