“Exposure to infants in the social environment,” economists Sebastian Galiani and Raul Sosa write in a recent paper, “activates neurobiological mechanisms that increase the desire for parenthood.”
That is, babies are contagious.
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We’ve long known that. As a culture of rational sophisticates, we try to laugh off “baby fever” as an old wives’ tale. As egalitarians and professionals, we aren’t supposed to admit how babies and hormones interact. But it’s all real.
“Where adults see more children, adults want more children,” the economists concluded. “Where the young population shrinks, so does the desire for parenthood.”
In other words, pregnancy is contagious, and Baby Busts are self-reinforcing. Low birth rates beget lower birth rates.
The infamous 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus believed the opposite. He thought birthrates would be self-correcting: “High birthrates make a people poorer, people respond to poverty by having fewer children, with fewer children among whom to divvy up the pie people become richer, and people respond to wealth by having more children.”
Underlying this system is the grim belief that children are a net cost, almost a luxury good.
Malthusianism was wrong. When birth rates get low, that tends to drive birth rates even lower. One reason: Cultures with fewer kids will be less kid-friendly, which increases the difficulty and social costs of having kids.
Another reason, just as important: Being near babies makes people want babies. That’s what Galiani and Sosa call “the empathy channel” for increasing the “demand” for babies.
“Infant exposure activates the brain’s reward circuitry, triggers oxytocin release promoting caregiving desire and extends to fathers,” the economists argue. “The mechanism operates through sensory contact rather than deliberation. Psychologists find that the affective component of fertility motivation is more than twice as strong as the cognitive one in predicting ‘baby fever’ intensity.”
And now that the number of young children is declining every single day, it becomes more and more difficult every day to reverse the Baby Bust.
Galiani and Sosa estimate that 13% of the collapse in birth rates over the past 18 years is due to the decline in Baby Fever, but it might be as high as 33%, they say.
Self-perpetuating cycles are tough to reverse, but this one might have an easy solution: Everyone with a baby should bring the baby everywhere and hand their bundle of joy off to a childless young adult — the human race depends on it.
