When animal spirits turn inward

The Washington Examiner reports a Harris Poll finding that young Americans in their prime family-forming years are choosing pets over children at striking rates, and commentators have reached, predictably, for the language of character: irresponsibility, immaturity, a generation unwilling to grow up. I would ask those commentators to try a different lens before they reach for another epithet.

Animal spirits — the spontaneous confidence that moves people to make long commitments, to invest in uncertain futures — do not operate in a vacuum. They are nourished, or starved, by material conditions. A household that cannot afford a two-bedroom flat, that carries the weight of student debt into its thirties, that has watched wages grow more slowly than rents for the better part of two decades, is not exhibiting a character defect when it declines to add a dependent. It is exhibiting the rational caution of someone who has looked at the balance sheet and found it wanting. That this caution takes the form of a dog rather than a child is a sociological detail; the macroeconomic structure beneath it is the real story.

There is also what I would call — borrowing from my own framework, if you will permit the indulgence — a paradox of demographic thrift. Each individual household that defers childbearing makes a sensible calculation given its own circumstances. The aggregate consequence of millions of such calculations is a shrinking working-age population, a narrowing tax base, and mounting pressure on every public programme that depends on future contributors. What is prudent for the individual household is, in aggregate, a slow fiscal calamity. We have been here before, in different guise, whenever private retrenchment compounds itself into collective impoverishment.

The policy answer is not, I hasten to say, to lecture young people about their reproductive duties to the nation. That road leads nowhere worth going. The answer is to ask what public investments — in affordable housing, in childcare infrastructure, in wage floors that keep pace with productivity — would restore the material confidence that makes long commitments feel possible again. Demand for children, if one may speak of it in such clinical terms, is suppressed not by laziness but by cost and precarity. Suppress cost and precarity, and the spirits may yet revive.

I acknowledge freely that I cannot know the precise mechanics of today's housing finance markets, the full architecture of student debt, or the distributional detail of modern wage data — those are matters that evolved well after my time, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the underlying structure I do recognise: a generation's animal spirits are being rationed by scarcity, and the state is choosing to treat the symptom — or rather, to deplore the symptom — rather than address the cause. That is an old mistake dressed in new clothes, and it is no more forgivable for being familiar.