Where are Brighton's babies?

The Sunday Times heads to the LGBT capital of the UK to find out why its birth rate is so low

I write this as our two month old baby sleeps. So far he seems to be – touch wood! – a good sleeper, so I’m easing myself back into the writing routine. Thank you for all of the kind messages from readers and listeners. We’re both doing well, although we had a difficult and extended stay in hospital (which I may well write about on another occasion). 

I’m currently spending a good 6-8 hours a day breastfeeding. Which is to say that I’m currently spending a good 6-8 hours a day either watching TV or amusing myself on my phone (Substack is a great friend during the 3am feeds). Yesterday, my phone offered me this gem: a long read in The Sunday Times titled ‘What Brighton tells us about Britain’s tumbling birth rate’, or the alternative (and funnier) version: ‘Brighton has one of Britain’s lowest birth rates. We went to find out why.’ 

As The Sunday Times reports: 

Last week, official birthrate figures from the Office for National Statistics highlighted the growing fertility crisis. There are 1.44 children per woman, the lowest on record, and down from nearly three in the 1960s.

In Brighton and Hove, the rate is 0.98, one of the lowest in Britain. Brighton is more similar to South Korea (0.72), which has the lowest rate in the world, than the rest of the country.

The headline made me laugh because it invites such an obvious answer. For non-Brits who may not know, Brighton is famously gay. In fact, it is “officially the queer capital of the UK”, as Brighton and Hove News reported last year when the latest census data was released.¹

“Could it be that Brighton being the gay capital of the UK has something to do with it?” asks one of the top comments below the line. “This article could have been one sentence” reads another. 

And yet Brighton’s gayness goes almost entirely unmentioned in the piece. Instead, the author reaches the same conclusion that almost every article on the birth rates issue inevitably reaches, confidently asserting that the sole culprit must surely be the cost of housing and childcare. And ok yes, Brighton property is expensive – though not as expensive as many other parts of the UK – and yes, childcare is expensive too. Most people assume (quite reasonably!) that expensive housing and childcare will discourage people from having children, so these articles keep being churned out week after week in the British press. I have every sympathy for the – typically childless and propertyless – young journalists who see this as an opportunity to complain about the impact of house prices on their generation. I stand in solidarity with Nicholas, 30 ans. 

The problem is that there isn’t any evidence for this thesis. In fact, we see almost the exact opposite effect in the real world data. 

The Times piece does actually acknowledge this in passing, contradicting the entire argument by noting that “fertility rates tend to be higher among families who are less well off.” That’s true – both domestically and internationally, poor people tend to have more children than rich people do (to be more precise, women’s earnings seem to be negatively correlated with fertility). 

The UK is experiencing the same fertility crash as most of the rest of the world. Everywhere in the West is now at sub-replacement fertility, along with much of South America, North Africa, and Asia, particularly Northeast Asian countries. Places with cheap property – rural Japan, say, or rural France – nevertheless have extremely low fertility, as do countries that provide enormous childcare subsidies and cash transfers to parents.  

The single best predictor of a country’s fertility rate is its level of affluence. Once a country crosses the threshold of $5,000 USD in GDP per capita—the wealth of a country like Indonesia—it quickly crosses the threshold into sub-replacement fertility. In other words, low fertility isn’t caused by material deprivation, it’s caused by material abundance. 

The really interesting question is what exact mechanism is causing this effect. And the Brighton example is useful in understanding the complex interaction between ideology and material conditions. 

It could be that the answer to the question posed by the Times piece is the really obvious one. I don’t know what the fertility rate is for LGBT people in the UK, but figures from the United States suggest it’s probably very low: 18% of LGBT adults in the U.S. are parents, compared with 69% of U.S. adults overall (those figures include adopted and foster children). Maybe Brighton just has a particularly large proportion of people who are particularly unlikely to have kids? 

And yet the LGBT population in Brighton isn’t actually that large. As Brighton and Hove News concedes, “[n]ationally, 89.4 percent (around 43.4 million people) identified as straight or heterosexual, but in Brighton and Hove this figure was lower at 80.6 percent.” So we’re only talking about an extra 8.8%, which could well include plenty of women who identify as bisexual but end up with male partners. It could be that this slight decrease in the straight population is enough to nudge Brighton into the ultra-low-fertility top spot, but it’s hard to be sure. 

I suspect that the politics of Brighton’s residents are at least as important as their sexuality. As this superb essay by Johann Kurtz elucidates, the low status afforded to parenthood in affluent societies is key to understanding why fertility is so low: 

[C]onventional explanations [for falling fertility] don’t work in any kind of consistent and predictable fashion, including the (seemingly credible) explanations most commonly given by the actual cohorts which have failed to have children. Failing to accept this leads to disaster, like South Korea spending hundreds of billions on economic incentives to have children, only for their birthrate to drop yet faster.

We are thus presented with an apparent paradox: a stable trend which continues to unfold across the West, in country after country, generation after generation, without an obvious causal logic. How is this to be explained?

I propose that there is, in fact, an under-appreciated fundamental cause of these trends, which manifests in the form of different proximate causes (real and imagined) across different geographies and times.

This fundamental cause is status.

Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.

In such a paradigm, if a tradeoff is to be made between having children and another activity which results in higher status conferral (an example would be ‘pursuing a successful career’ for women) then having children will be deprioritized. Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.

Some sub-cultures are particularly prone to “hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult.” Religion seems to provide some protection against this phenomenon, as does temporal proximity to a poor (and thus fertile) culture, as is evident in the fact that the most fertile parts of the UK are also the places with the highest proportion of first and second generation Muslim immigrants (the Times piece provides a useful interactive map). 

Brighton is not only famously gay, it is also famously Left wing and atheistic, which means that the residents of Brighton are disproportionately likely to subscribe to an ideology that regards parenting as particularly low status – even more so than the ambient culture in the UK, which isn’t especially keen on parenthood either. 

The Times speaks to one Brighton resident: 

Crozier, 34, is bucking the local trend. She has one child and is pregnant with her second. “I certainly don’t know anybody who’s going to have more than two,” she said. “If someone has three, you’re like, ‘Really, why would you have three?’”

She goes on to talk about house prices and so on, but that comment – “really, why would you have three?” – gets much closer to the truth of what’s going on. I’d be amazed if Left-leaning, atheistic, affluent, straight people in other parts of the UK have a higher birth rate than the residents of Brighton. 

Which brings me, as so often, back to Stein’s Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." If people who subscribe to a Brighton-like culture are having half the number of children necessary to replace themselves, what next for the Brighton-like cultures of the world? 

1. Incidentally, this was the same census that found that 1 in 67 Muslims in Britain is transgender... for more on this surprising finding, see this piece by Brighton resident and friend of the pod Kathleen Stock.