Links in Progress: Rising incomes do not always mean fewer births
And how having a baby can make you believe in the future
This is the first issue of ‘Links in Progress’, semi-regular roundups of interesting stuff that's happening in topics that we care about. In this one, Boom’s Phoebe Arslanagić-Little reviews the most important things happening in the world of pronatalism and family policy. You can opt out of Links in Progress here.
In case you missed it, Issue 16 of Works in Progress is out!
1. Rising incomes do not always mean fewer births. There is very strong evidence that, over the last sixty years, people have fewer children as they become richer. But a July 2024 paper finds the opposite. Looking at randomized controlled trials of interventions such as business training programmes or land rights formalization in sub-Saharan Africa, the authors found that women who became wealthier had more children, not fewer. The effects were significant. Ethiopian women who received a business training intervention were 22 percent more likely to have a child, women in Togo were 14 percentage points more likely to do so.
2. Reproductive futurism. On Substack, Eva Shang explains how becoming a mother changed her relationship with the future: ‘...now that I have the baby, I can no longer accept that the world is dying. I now have to believe — and fervently do believe — that there is a Future we must work towards, because now this Future wears the face of my baby.’
3. Artificial wombs near human trials and why human gestation is hard to replicate. Artificial wombs that could save extremely premature babies are nearing human trials, but Sarah Constantin writes that the biological difficulties of developing an ‘end-to-end’ artificial womb to host a baby from egg to birth remain unsolved. This is partly to do with human and great ape traits, including our unusually ‘invasive’ placentas. Aria Babu has previously made the ethical case for artificial wombs and explained how progress is being held back by other factors, including that embryos can only be cultured for scientific research for 14 days. Pictured below is a 14 day-old embryo.
4. When babies and social conservatism conflict. Singapore, a country with an ultra-low fertility rate of 0.97, has allowed single women to freeze their eggs since 2023. But it is illegal for women to defrost and use those eggs unless they are legally married. In July, Singapore published data showing that births are at their lowest in fifty years, with a 5.8 percent decline from 2022 to 2023.
5. Clocking out of conception? Weekly working hours are the single most influential variable affecting the pregnancy intentions of South Korean women according to this 2023 study of 22,000 women. Women who worked 40-45 hours a week had a 2.009 times higher chance of falling pregnant compared with women working more than 45 hours a week or fewer than 40 hours. South Koreans work the fourth most hours in the OECD, beaten only by the considerably less wealthy countries of Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica and Chile.
6. The case for paying grandparents. Tyler Cowen – who would himself be willing to pay to look after his grandchildren – looks at Sweden’s policy of instead paying subsidies to grandparents to look after theirs. Cowen argues that though the policy might seem absurd, it is a Pareto improvement, a change that makes no-one worse off and at least one person better off. He adds that it might pay for itself by encouraging higher earning parents back to work more quickly.
7. How co-workers affect fertility decisions. This April 2024 study looked at data from 11 million Italians working in the private sector to investigate the peer effects of people’s fertility decisions on colleagues. They found that a 1 percentage-point decrease in average co-worker fertility led to a reduction in the individual probability of having a child of 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points.
8. Access to fertility treatment is important for human flourishing. A paper from May 2024 drawing on Swedish data finds that women whose fertility treatment is unsuccessful are 48 percent more likely to suffer from mental health issues several years later than those whose treatment is successful. Additionally, this group of women experiences no income benefits or protection in comparison with those who have a child after treatment. The authors also find that infertile couples in the lowest decile of income distribution are willing to pay proportionately more for the chance to have a child via IVF than couples in the highest (5.5 months of disposable income versus 3.1).
9. 47,000 godchildren and counting. In 2009, the country of Georgia’s religious leader – Patriarch Ilia II – responded to declining birth rates by announcing that he would: personally baptize any baby born to parents with more than two children; carry out the baptism in Tbilisi’s cathedral; and act as the baby’s godfather. 15 years on, Ilia has more than 47,000 godchildren, including those from a mass baptism of 1,200 babies carried out in July.
10. Giving birth has not become less safe for American moms. Saloni Dattani explains that the terrifying rise in maternal deaths in the US since 2000 is actually the result of a change in how maternal mortality is measured. A ‘pregnancy checkbox’ began to be added to death certificates in 2003, which led to the overcounting of maternal deaths, in some cases because the box was ticked by mistake. The checkbox was adopted at different paces in different states, creating the appearance of a gradual rise in deaths seen in the above chart.
11. IVF has become significantly more effective, including over the past decade…In the UK in 1995 (the year my husband was born via IVF), on average only eight percent of embryo transfers resulted in the birth of a child. In 2010, it was 16 percent Today, it’s 23 percent (and 25 percent when the embryo has been frozen prior to implantation). This comes from the UK’s Human Fertility and Embryology Authority’s new data dashboard.
12. …and might be about to improve further! In July, it was announced that 42.6 percent of IVF patients randomized to take a pill designed to make it easier for an embryo to implant into the womb gave birth to a child, in comparison with 35.7 percent of those who took the placebo. The drug will next be tested on a larger group of women.
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