The Benefits of a Low Birth Rate

This letter to the Straits Times newspaper has attracted some online comment, mostly negative, among people I know. The writer claims that Singapore's low birth rate is attributable to society valuing career-building over home and family and to women having unreasonably high expectations for the men they'd want to marry (hence delaying marriage and childbirth), resulting in "a nation of 'spoilt princesses' unwilling and unable to handle the rigours of motherhood."

I'm not particularly interested in his characterization of women. What strikes me is that we still believe that a low birth rate among citizens and permanent residents is an impediment to the success of Singapore, an open and cosmopolitan city. The argument often offered for encouraging locals to have more children is that it increases the pool of talent from which the country can draw upon for its endeavors. This notion rides on a whole set of implicit beliefs and even bears some historical baggage.

The one that is in the back of everyone's mind, whether voiced or not, is Lee Kuan Yew's professed belief in some kind of eugenics. He believed that children born to educated, intelligent parents would likewise be more likely to succeed in life, because intelligence or ability is heritable. As a result, policies like the Graduate Mothers Scheme gave incentives for highly-educated women, who were also less likely to get married and have many children, for each child they bore. The declining birth rate is most marked among university graduates and careerists, precisely the kind of people that Singapore believes it needs more of. Hence birth rate anxiety is also class anxiety.

The other assumption is that talent inheres in a more-or-less fixed proportion of society, let us say the top 5% or so. Therefore, to have more talent, one can only increase the total size of society so that we have more people in this upper bracket. If, however, we believe that talent and ability are neither the products of inheritance nor necessarily rare or scarce, we are free to imagine more possibilities for society. I have found, more often than not, that my peers have developed their talents not through sheer innate force of will or genius, but through early influences in their upbringing, through the environment and work ethic which they have been immersed in, and through interactions with the people and resources that they have encountered. That is to say, we are more products of our circumstances than we like to think. Therefore, the reason that 'talent' (or should we instead say: conventional markers of success) is concentrated in a small segment of society does not suggest that true talent is rare. Instead it means that most people do not experience that fortunate confluence of circumstance and motivation that displays one's innate abilities to best advantage.

This explains why a low birth rate can help Singapore. Instead of raising the population to increase the number of 'talents', we should instead focus our efforts on increasing the proportion of high ability within the population size. As for the issue of importing 'foreign talent', which incurs a lot of resentment, I remain agnostic, but observe that poaching from the best that other countries have to offer has been how America, for example, has maintained its technological lead over other countries. The main issue then is that the local population represents a pool of potential talent that should be developed and nurtured fully before we should claim that we need to look outside to find people of ability. The same set of implicit assumptions, and the same refutations of them, applies to that issue too.