In 1992, P. D. James published Children of Men. The novel is set in 2021 in the United Kingdom. James’ world is one in which no children have been born since 1995. Male fertility has since been zero and no woman has been able to have a baby. James’s dystopia is one of economic, societal, and political collapse, driven by the lack of children.
Our own world is not teetering on the brink of this scenario. However, birth rates are plummeting across the globe, especially in OECD countries. Conservative estimates put the global population peak at around 2060, followed by a decline into the twenty-second century. Many nations are already in the midst of a demographic collapse, with modernized Asian economies leading the way. Japan’s fertility rate in 2020 was 1.34, whilst South Korea’s was an appalling 0.78 as of 2022. This rate is appalling because the minimum replacement fertility rate is 2.1. For a population to sustain itself, women need to, on average, bear 2.1 or more children. This low-fertility scenario might sound attractive if your environmental policy boat is floated by the idea of fewer human beings. However, James’ dystopia ought to make us think twice about the virtues of population collapse.
A world with fewer human beings might have lower greenhouse emissions, but the trade-offs are geopolitical and economic instability. It is a world that is likely to be poorer, with fewer tax-payers, fewer workers, and overall fewer economic lifters—all having to support, unless we forswear the use of life-saving medicines, a growing mass of ultra-dependent older citizens. Even so, the Boomer generation is beginning to die off and, as the American author Peter Zeihan has recently argued, they are taking their unprecedented wealth with them, leaving a poorer and more troubled world behind them.
A Very First World Problem
The issue of population decline is not a supranational one when speaking of public policy. National governments oversee population fluctuations. Here, they can take varying approaches to the problem. On the one hand, you have immigration, whereby foreigners are imported on a mass scale in order to prop up a declining working-age population—this is the approach taken by most Western nations. The other approach is family policy: encouraging people to have more babies.
This latter approach can be observed in Hungary, where Ágnes Hornung serves as the state secretary for families. Sitting in her spacious office in the Ministry of Culture and Innovation near the Parliament and Kossuth Lajos tér, Hornung has stated that “there are two choices for governments: either immigration or family policy. Since the 2010 election, the Hungarian Government has chosen the latter.” This approach is a stark contrast to the rest of the European Union (EU). In 2022, 44.4% of the EU’s population was over 44 years old. In other words, Europe’s population is aging quickly, a problem that is being addressed—or, more accurately, kicked into the long grass—primarily through unprecedented levels of net immigration.
The high immigration approach is an understandable one. Balancing, or at least managing, budgets is a significant task for modern governments. As the bureaucratic welfare state has grown in scope and complexity over the past century, so have national budgets, subsequently increasing the tax burden. Reliance on government services and welfare payments has increased. At the same time, the number of people paying for those services through taxation has been in decline. Meanwhile, former taxpayers (retirees) understandably expect to benefit from this welfare system that they helped to fund. Baby Boomers are now benefiting from the welfare system that they designed and paid for.
Governments around the world are facing an acute policy crisis due to a dramatic demographic shift. They will soon be left with many more economic leaners and far fewer economic lifters. And as the leaners (the Boomers) die off, the lifters will be left with less capacity to make ends meet, both at a household level and at a governmental level. In the West, we have just lived through the most decadent age in history, where we enjoyed living standards that were previously unimaginable. That age will not continue.
Many Western governments are doing what they can to keep the party going. In Australia, as in Europe, successive governments have leaned into immigration as the solution. Australia is a nation of 25 million and yet is projected to welcome around 1 million migrants over the coming two years. This decision is difficult to understand, especially if one considers the housing crisis that is currently gripping the nation.
Why is the Australian government doing this? It is quite simple: Australia needs more people. Australia’s fertility rate was 1.58 in 2020 and has been below replacement level for decades. The situation is the same in Western Europe, where birth rates have collapsed and immigration has skyrocketed in recent decades. Western countries need more university students, more skilled workers, more taxi drivers, more cleaners, (lots) more social care workers, more general practitioners, and more people in general.
In the end, immigration—whatever its unquestionable downsides—equals more taxpayers and more economic activity in general. But the immigration solution is, at best, a medium-term one. Many of the countries from which immigrants to Western countries originate, especially Africa and the Middle East, are on course for their own demographic collapse. These breakdowns will lag behind the decline of populations in the West, which is a small mercy. Still, the immigration solution is not sustainable.
This leaves family policy. Of course, the state taking an interest in family life is not unique to Hungary. Countries like the now-forlorn South Korea have attempted bold pro-fertility policies to arrest their disastrous birth rates. As Scott Yenor has recently explained in First Things, the example of South Korea is complex, and includes a history of promoting anti-natalism for the purposes of economic development. Unfortunately for South Korean policymakers, the pro-natalist measures of the last two decades have failed. Fertility has continued to tumble, resulting in various toxic social and cultural developments, which cultural analyst Aaron Renn warns could easily be mirrored in the West.
Australia provides a contrast. Embedded in the minds of Australians older than 30 is an image of Peter Costello, then Australia’s federal Treasurer, surrounded by unhappy babies in a Melbourne maternity hospital. This 2002 photo-op was part of the announcement of the Coalition government’s ‘Baby Bonus’ policy. Costello and the prime minister under which he served, John Howard, recognized that immigration was not a sustainable solution to Australia’s declining fertility.
The policy was, in practice, an AUD$2500 payment to families upon the birth of a child, which eventually rose to AUD$5000 under subsequent governments. And the results were solid. The birth rate rose from 1.7 in 2001 to almost 2.0 by 2008. In other words, the Baby Bonus worked. The policy was abolished in 2014, and Australia’s fertility rate has since declined to below 1.6.
In Hungary, the issue is even more acute than the situation faced by Australia. In the inaugural year of the Australian Baby Bonus, Hungary’s fertility rate was below 1.3. By the time the conservative Fidesz Government was elected in 2010, it was edging towards 1.2. “It was a bad time for Hungary,” states Dr. Attila Beneda, deputy secretary of state for family affairs. “We needed to change how Hungarian society functioned.”
The newly-elected Fidesz government did this by framing their policy plans with two ‘pillars,’ according to Beneda. “Hungary needed to become a society based on work, and a society based on families.” The thrust of the government’s response was therefore to incentivize child-bearing, in part because, as Beneda asserted, “demography is the national strategic problem.” The Fidesz leadership recognized the risks posed by population decline. The question was how to address the root problem.
“Policies that address the fertility rate are some of the most important in the government’s policy framework,” said Hornung. “Hungary’s fertility rate is 1.52 as of 2022.” However, the issue runs deeper than you might expect. Healthy demography is more than a question of economic prudence. Anyone who spends a prolonged period of time in Hungary will realize that the Magyars are a people with a distinctive identity, a proud history, and a rich culture.
Hungary is a nation that has been almost constantly under duress from outsiders throughout its history. Over the course of this difficult history, which includes domination by the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, and then the Communist regime, the Hungarian people have retained their culture. Virág, a young law student in the eastern city of Debrecen, put it to me in the following: “This period since the collapse of communism is the longest time Hungary has ruled itself in the last few centuries.”
All of this underlies Fidesz’s approach to the issue of demography. Hornung put it like this: “We want to keep the Hungarian culture, the Hungarian way of thinking, and the Hungarian language.” Fertility rates below replacement levels point to a slow but inevitable disappearance of Hungarian culture. Family policy is one tool that the Hungarian government is deploying to address this, a tool which places them in contrast with other nations around them. “In Europe,” Deputy Secretary Beneda observed, “family is not the main direction policy-makers are taking to address the issue of demography; we in Hungary have to make our own way.”
The Hungarian Strategy
Those in Hungary most certainly have made their own way. Since coming to power in 2010, the Fidesz government of Viktor Orbán has increased spending on family policies from year to year. The 2023 amount is three times that of 2020, corresponding to 4.5% of GDP. This dwarfs the government’s spending on defense, which the minister for foreign affairs and trade, Péter Szijjártó, recently announced would increase to above 2%. Defense is critical to the future of Hungary, especially in light of geopolitical developments across the northeastern border in Ukraine. But spending on family policies is evidence of the government’s focus on families and fertility for Hungary’s future.
The policy priority of the family can be set within a wider constitutional framework. The Fundamental Law, which has been in place since 2012, states that “the family and the nation constitute the principal framework of our coexistence.” This statement reflects the conviction that the family is the basic unit of society, an idea embedded in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Section 23, article 1 of the ICCPR states: “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”
However, the constitutional provisions in Hungary’s Fundamental Law go further. Article (L) contains the following propositions:
(1) Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman established by voluntary decision, and the family as the basis of the survival of the nation. Family ties shall be based on marriage or the relationship between parents and children. The mother shall be a woman; the father shall be a man.
(2) Hungary shall support the commitment to have children.
The Fidesz government’s commitment to family policy sits within this more basic constitutional framework. According to the Fundamental Law, every government, whether conservative or progressive, whether Right or Left, is obligated to support the family in legislation and policy.
“Couples want more children than they have,” said Beneda. This is echoed by Hornung, who argues that, along with providing direct financial support, the policies were designed to ensure that “everyone who wants to have children can do so.” This doesn’t mean that Hungary is to become a baby factory. “We trust the individual to decide what is best for them,” assured Beneda. “The idea is to remove barriers to having children.”
The second part of this study will examine how Hungary has sought to remove those barriers, whether it has been successful, and how those policies might be contextualized within the wider world’s demographic challenges.
