Why JD Vance worries about childlessness
The Republican vice presidential nominee linked low fertility to high housing costs, social isolation and a lack of patriotism.
Sen. JD Vance sees Americans’ reluctance to have children as tied to risk aversion and a culture of social isolation that threatens to weigh on U.S. economic dynamism.
Since becoming Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, the Ohio Republican has come under scrutiny for criticizing people who don’t have children. In 2021, he told Fox News that the U.S. is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He singled out Vice President Kamala Harris, now the expected Democratic nominee, among others. Harris is married with two stepchildren.
After joining the Senate last year, Vance became one of the most outspoken lawmakers about the decline in U.S. fertility. The total fertility rate—a snapshot of how many children a woman is expected to bear over her lifetime—fell to 1.62 last year, provisional government figures show, the lowest on record, and well below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to keep population steady, absent immigration.
The issue has long been on Vance’s mind. In an interview in April with The Wall Street Journal, Vance described low fertility as having many causes, no simple remedy and negative consequences beyond simply a smaller workforce and less sustainable programs such as Social Security.
“A very important part of kids’ social development obviously is spending time with other kids,” Vance said. But with lower birthrates, “you have a lot less brothers and sisters, you also have many, many fewer cousins. I think childhood has become much more socially isolated.”
In the interview, Vance listed several possible causes of lower birthrates. One, he said, is financial: “I do think there’s just something about the economies of having families that have really gotten out of whack,” Vance said, and aren’t fully captured by traditional economic metrics.
He cited high housing costs in particular. In the two decades after World War II, he said, couples could buy a 1,500- to 1,900-square-foot starter home on one middle-class income. Today, he said, the U.S. doesn’t build a lot of starter homes that size, and for people with even two middle-class incomes, the bigger starter homes on the market are far outside their price range.
He also linked lower birthrates to young Americans growing up more socially isolated. “They’re not spending as much time socially together. They’re certainly not dating as much as they used to.” This manifests itself as “less marriage, much thinner friendship groups.”
Vance said lower fertility might also be the result of less patriotism. In Israel, which has relatively high fertility, “there’s still a fundamental sense that they love their country, they want their country to keep going. America was always considered by our European friends to be kind of jingoistic back in the 1990s and 2000s. We had pretty healthy fertility rates back then. Now that we’re a little bit more like our European counterparts, much less sort of innately patriotic than we were 20, 30 years ago, our fertility rates have declined.”
Vance cited several negative consequences to low birthrates. “I think there are all these weird ways in which technological dynamism depends on having families and children,” he said, pointing, as evidence, to the 1950s and 1960s, during the baby boom, the associated social and workplace collaboration, and strong economic growth.
“If you have kids you’re probably a little bit more willing to take on risk and you’re probably a little bit less willing to do it if you don’t have family,” he said. “There’s all of these very weird and totally underappreciated ways in which it makes our society worse off.”
Vance also said that, while he is strongly antiabortion, that is unrelated to his concerns about fertility, and he doesn’t think access to the procedure is a major cause of declining U.S. fertility, given that other countries with more restrictive abortion laws are seeing sharper declines in childbearing. “I think there is some connection but I think it’s pretty weak,” he said.
Democrats say Vance’s stances on parenthood and reproductive rights risk alienating women voters, particularly those living in the suburbs of battleground states who have outsize sway in deciding this year’s presidential election.
“Trump, Vance, and their entire party have made it clear that they stand against women and their ability to start a family when and how they choose,” said Sarafina Chitika, a Harris spokeswoman.
While Vance has studied pronatalist policies in countries including South Korea, France, Hungary and Japan, he said hasn’t yet seen any clear solution to falling fertility. “I’m fascinated by Hungary…because they’re aggressively trying a lot of different things. And I think some of it’s working.” The U.S. should look at lowering income-tax rates on women who have multiple children as Hungary has done, he said.
In a 2021 interview, before he was a senator, Vance had said that people without children should pay higher tax rates than people who have children. (Some provisions of the current tax code, such as the child tax credit, have that effect.)
Greater immigration wasn’t the solution to lower birthrates, Vance said in the April interview with the Journal. One reason is that immigrants’ own fertility tends to resemble that of the native-born. Another is that once the share of a country’s foreign-born population becomes greater than 15%, he said, it spawns a backlash and social division, and also makes assimilation more difficult, he said.
“It’s like the difference between having your own family over for dinner and having strangers come over for dinner,” Vance said. “It’s nice to have new people come over for dinner. But you need to have some core for other people to assimilate into or I think it totally transforms the nature of your society.”
Liz Essley Whyte contributed to this article.
Write to Greg Ip at greg.ip@wsj.com and Janet Adamy at Janet.Adamy@wsj.com
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First Published:29 Jul 2024, 05:39 PM IST
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