The question of whether to have children looms large for many environmentalists. The ecology movement has long had a seam of Malthusian concern for human numbers, running into outright misanthropy among some deep greens who characterise humans as little more than a virus the planetary ecosystem would be better off without.
In recent years, the contact between the ecological movement and the traditional left has formed a new, emerging consensus that overconsumption is the primary engine of the climate crisis, rather than overpopulation per se. Danny Dorling’s body of work helps us to understand that a billion people could easily fry the planet, while it is also perfectly possible in principle to live sustainably with 10 billion. The main question is of the distribution of resources, consumption and emissions. And in a world of ever-widening inequality, it’s a shrinking proportion of a global elite who are doing the most to ensure that babies are being born onto a hotter planet.
Paul Morland’s new book No One Left says we have exactly the opposite problem to overpopulation: we are running out of babies. While the human population is still growing in absolute numbers, the rate of population is decelerating, with a peak expected around 2100. Almost everywhere in the world, birth rates are in freefall decline. Here in the UK we now have the lowest birth rate of any G7 country. While this news would have some environmentalists dancing in the streets, Morland’s book raises many of the attendant socio-economic problems that will arise from a world in which there aren’t enough young people to go around. Who will pay into pensions? Who will collect the bins? And who will do all of that in the even smaller generation beneath them?
It can be difficult to have a dispassionate discussion about all this. Presently, whether you are instinctively concerned about overpopulation, or more of a pronatalist, taking any interest in fertility on either side means you quite quickly find yourself rubbing up against fringes of woman-haters, white supremacists and weirdos.
In the UK, birth rates are indeed a preternatural concern of the right wing, with the issue repeatedly bubbling up in various fringe events at the recent Conservative party conference. A few years ago, The Sun ran a campaign encouraging its readers to “bonk for Britain”, a phrase sick-educing enough to make more than the corners of your mouth droop. And even when a writer like Morland goes to some lengths to formally acknowledge and move past strands of nationalism, racism and misogyny, his arguments still rely on babies being viewed primarily as units of human labour rather than just, you know, humans.
What is to be done? In October 2024, analysis from the Centre for Progressive Policy found that Britain’s fertility plummeted relative to that of its peers through the period of austerity, calling it the “principal factor”. Just weeks prior to this, at the same Conservative party conference with so much hand-wringing over birth rates, the current leader of the opposition, then a front-runner for the post, bemoaned the “excessive” maternity pay in the UK. It is in fact set at one of the lowest rates measured by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The reality of child-rearing in a country ravaged by cuts and underinvestment is the terrain Dorling charts in his arresting new book Seven Children. The titular children are statistical constructs, ordering the 14 million children of the UK by parental income, splitting them into seven groups of 2 million, and then taking a child from the very middle of each group, imagining them as a real person in a real family. What is most striking about this exercise is quite how materially deprived even the seventh child is, owing to the sheer concentration of income and wealth in a vanishingly small proportion of the population.
Dorling explains that the majority of children in the UK “are growing up in poor or modest homes”, and gives accounts of how life since the 2008 crash has resulted in such inequality that even households with relatively high incomes are now unable to do basic things like take an annual summer holiday with their children, have their classmates round for tea, or do up their bedrooms every few years. For anyone who worries that babies being born today might go on to consume too much, Seven Children shows that we might be more worried that they won’t consume enough.
It is tempting to conclude that modern advanced economies are ill-suited to stimulating fertility. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that falling birth rates are not entirely the product of female emancipation, with surveys across Europe finding that women in general are having roughly one fewer child than they would like. Something, then, surely, is holding us back. Might it be the explicitly anti-natal circumstances, such as crippling childcare costs, poor maternity and paternity conditions, and the housing crisis?
Here Morland casts more gloom on things. He points to examples of governments around the world that have tried to inflate birth rates through tax cuts and other economic incentives. Almost nowhere have these measures had the desired effect. Indeed, Dorling also observes that in the UK, richer families have fewer children, a general truism that holds that birth rates fall as prosperity rises. Instead, Morland suggests that birth rates are attached more to culture than to politics and economics, noting some apparent associations with nationalism and Abrahamic religions. The only advanced economy in the world currently achieving replacement level, he observes, is Israel.
Despite the evidence marshalled by Morland suggesting that government interventions don’t inflate the birth rate, I cannot shake the feeling in my bones that there would be more babies if modern Britain did not make it so difficult to raise children. Either way, one effect of putting into place policies intended to make parenting easier would be to improve life for the children in Dorling’s book. For that reason alone, it would be worth doing. For example, lifting the two-child benefit cap would elevate a quarter of a million children from poverty overnight. The moral and practical questions surrounding the unborn may remain intractable, but there is a great deal that can be done to alleviate misery and want within children who are already with us. Let’s at least start with that.
No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children by Paul Morland. Forum, 2024. ISBN: 9781800754102.
Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generationby Danny Dorling. C. Hurst & Co, 2024. ISBN: 9781911723509.
