Episode Details

Good Sunday morning to you,

Today’s piece is all about decision-making and the decline of family in the west.

Before I crack on, I just wanted to flag a couple of things.

Wearing my comedy hat, I’m taking An Evening of Curious Songs on a mini tour in the spring - shows in London (Crazy Coqs), Somerset, Surrey, Essex and Hampshire. Tickets make great Christmas pressies, so please take a look.

And my new album, It’s ALL True, is out. CDs also make great Christmas pressies for errant uncles, so check that out too in the DF shop.

So to today’s piece - Why so many bad decisions?

I’ve recently been looking at my family tree on one of those ancestry websites, and I was amazed to see just how big some of the families were in 19th and early 20th Century England. Having nine or 10 brothers and sisters was not unusual.

Today, families are much smaller. All sorts of reasons have been proffered for that. Matt Ridley argues that families get smaller as people grow wealthier and live longer. In poorer countries, you might have lots of children, knowing that a significant number will not make it through pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood, let alone the teenage years. With the longer safer lives we now have in the west, you can have two or three kids and know that the likelihood is that they will make it safely to adulthood. 

Stat of the day: in 1850, life expectancy in Britain was 40 for men and 42 for women. Today it is double that. Be grateful you are alive in Britain today - you get to live twice as long.

But when parents themselves are asked why they don’t have more children, the most commonly given reason is cost. People ca no’t afford to have more kids. The biggest expense of bringing up a child - government aside (the state takes half of everything you will ever earn) - is somewhere to live. We can no longer afford to buy the large homes our Victorian ancestors built to house their families, so just putting a roof over their head is problem enough. I’ve written endlessly about house prices being a function of cheap, debt-based, fiat money, and it’s quite easy to, therefore, attribute declining family size to fiat.

The average cost of raising a child to 18 is now over two hundred grand. Add in school fees and you can double that number. To age 18, you say. Most kids now stay at home well into their 20s. If you look at who has big families today, it is most unusual to see an ordinary middle-class family with five or more kids. It tends to be only the very rich, who can afford it, the very poor, who get state aid and thus can also afford it (especially if housing is covered), or the very religious.

On that note, my friend Simo