Marriage 2.0

I'm going to talk about marriage and parenting because they've got to do with Population and Fertility,  one of my fave topics that rank right up there between Idiotic Politicians and Best Online Fashion Stores.

Enough has been said about why people are not reproducing (1.15 TFR last year, from 2.07 in 1975) which is mostly uninformed (read: unempirical) opinion-making by policy-makers who rely on mostly attitudinal studies by sociologists.  Yap explains that the attitude of wanting marriage and children (as revealed in the surveys) stems from a life-course perspective. In other words, at 25 when all of my friends are just graduated and are busy climbing the corporate ladder, the last thing on my mind is family planning; whereas ask a 30 year old that question and peer pressure plus a biological clock might induce a different attitude. Duh. It doesn't tell me anything useful, just that people have different priorities at different ages.

Other researchers are more interested in criticising policies for being too patriarchal and protective of the normative family form. This makes for an edgy Sociology 101 tutorial class, but it makes a very poor assumption that allowing alternative family forms to flourish would get you the desired TFR. Hypothetically, a policy tweak to relax the rules around who can qualify for maternity benefits and tax reliefs isn't magically going to raise the birthrate either, because unlike in the UK or US, women are still made to feel like sluts for being teenaged or unwed mothers here.

The state now know admits that Singaporeans, once married, would go on to have at least 1 to 2 children, and MCYS knows this well enough, as their own slightly inarticulate Minister has put it himself.  The state seems to have taken the entire TFR issue and dumped it into a new but no less prosaic marriage campaign.  They now blame the problem on people who don't get married soon enough to have that first baby in their twenties or those who don't marry at all. The state's newest scapegoat is the Finicky, Unrealistic Single.


How true is it then that marriage rates have faltered?  If you compare trends in the last five years, as opposed as comparing to 1979 when education levels of the general population were lower, you wouldn't see any change that's particularly eyebrow raising. The median age of first time marriages for both males and females didn't get much higher and the general rate of marriage slipped a few points but it doesn't tell you much unless you delve into the details of what sort of people were marrying at what age and if it's their first or second marriage. It's not that fewer people are marrying at such a significant rate, the picture shows that people are simply marrying later.

Source: Department of Statistics

So if people are marrying later, and therefore having fewer children as a result, why has this been happening? According to Yap Mui Teng, the opportunity costs for older women who have likely attained a more comfortable financial position or higher status position is obviously greater. Younger men likewise postpone marriage until they have attained a level of perceived financial capability, so unless a 35 year old man marries a 25 year old woman, chances are he isn't going to get further than two.

The Perception Gap

The problem about asking people why they are not having more children (or any at all) is you're asking them to rationalize something that could very well have nothing to do with reason.  In other words, measuring people's perception or attitude towards a decision they mostly haven't yet made is not going to get you any thing more than asking me to guess how many hairs are on your head.

If someone tells you it's "expensive" to have another baby and they "can't afford" it, how much face value are you going to give that statement? The birth rate has very little to do with the cost and benefit of parenting, which has been the premise on which policymakers have relied in their decades-long effort to up those stubborn fertility numbers. Yes, raising a family has to do with dollars and cents, and other more successful states in the Nordic and West European continents have shown that lots of state-sponsored help can raise the TFR, but the desire to raise a family has a lot to do with the perception of relative costs and not real costs.


I am going to argue that how much risk and cost that people perceive having a baby would entail directly correlates with how equal or unequal the society they live in is.

I think this is something worth considering because reason and rationality are only one way in which we come to our decisions. However, we need to acknowledge that rationality is not always so rational, and people's perceptions are relative to many things. One of those things, I believe, is how much their society fosters social trust, solidarity and a sense of fairness amongst its members. The higher the inequality, and trust me, Singapore is right up there, the less trust people have in the system and their state, and I dare to guess, the more likely they are to perceive high personal and economic costs to having children. This is why no amount of money (read Baby Bonus) or benefits would incentivise people who perceive themselves in a state of constant deprivation. They are perpetually comparing themselves with the Joneses next door. But if they see the Joneses, the Smiths and the Wongs down the street as JUST LIKE THEM, then your $6000 starts to look like an incentive rather than a number they would scorn as just not enough. On the other hand, many countries that are more equal than Singapore (check the GINI coefficient or index) are doing a lot better with their population growth.

Reduce Inequality and you Solve Your Birthrate Problem

Richard Wilkinson wrote in The Spirit Level that people in highly unequal societies like the US tend to feel pressure to enhance themselves by inflating their achievements and status. Status matters a lot (sound familiar?), and money matters even more because people use money to show their status. 

Wilkinson also found that in more unequal countries, children tend to have higher aspirations — but they’re completely unrealistic aspirations. They all want to be sports stars or celebrities or directors of large companies: the only thing that matters is being rich. In more equal societies, it may still be acceptable to be a skilled craftsman without being regarded as a loser. The culture shifts with inequality.

So what the MCYS should be examining isn't ways to get people to marry earlier because it isn't at all about choosy individuals and unrealistic ideals that is causing the problem of late marriages. The state needs to recognize that inequality affects us and our personal relationships intimately, making people increasingly neurotic about how they are seen, judged and valued by others. Status conscious people have expectations of themselves as parents in a whole different league than people who don't care about which school their cousin's child is in, or how much money their neighbour's kid is making as a banker. This feeds into their perception of relative deprivation if they were to marry earlier (before they get 3 promotions) or have that second child (and risk discrimination or further career advancement). 

Donald Low wrote in his blog and which was published in the Straitjacket Times yesterday that high social inequality could have serious repercussions for Singapore and advocated more inclusive, universal programmes to help those who aren't experiencing any social mobility.  I believe that it the government takes his advice and starts shaping up and stop being so stingy with its redistribution, the snowball effect would be felt in our birth rate.

Am I saying that a universal welfare system would push up birthrates? Yes and no. A better system of redistributive justice is the DNA of social trust and social solidarity. When people feel more secure about their lives, when they genuinely feel that they have an equal chance of getting to where they aspire to be, they would feel less status conscious because they would see themselves as LIKE MOST OTHER SINGAPOREANS and not belonging to some sandwiched, marginalised lower-middle class. This is one of the things that define more egalitarian societies like Sweden and Finland. Only when you get this sort of balance in your society would people feel that the relative benefit of having children outweighs the cost of it. Only then will people appreciate the money you give them to have a second or third child.

After all, rationality is sometimes misguided and perceptions are relative. Fix the inequality, and the population fixes itself.