‘In Response to My Critics’: The Care Debate

Chase Olivarius-McAllister

Yesterday, we received some extremely interesting responses to my post, “Should We Be Looking to the East for Elderly Care Models?”  You can read the whole thing here, but, in short, I argue that because the UK’s population is rapidly aging, Minister Paul Burstow should adopt policies like South Korea’s “War on Dementia,” not measures like Japan’s Hureai Kippu.

One critic, Helen Parsons, writes that “Mr Olivarius-McAllister’s hostility toward Minister Paul Burstow’s proposal is typical of Old Labour thinking: he rejects market-based solutions to social problems like elderly care, even those that are proven successful, because he thinks the elderly should be entitled to equally sub-standard care.”

To clarify, the idea of the “welfare state” first took shape in the minds of Victorian activists and intellectuals.  Institutions like the Fabian Society, trade unions, and the Labour Party agitated for the adoption of a national minimum wage and a pensions system in the nineteenth century.  Though Liberal legislation enacted between 1906 and 1914 lay the foundations, Britain’s welfare system came of age in the aftermath of the Second World War.  Wartime necessities like rationing and detailed economic planning had gotten people used to the idea that government intervention could be beneficial; memories of the human wastage caused by the Depression also remained powerful.  After so much sacrifice, the country did not want to leave people to the caprices of the market in times of unemployment, ill-health, and old age.

I don’t think that “the elderly should be entitled to equally sub-standard care.”  I think that offering Britons anything less than both care and equality in old age is substandard.  And I don’t think this way of thinking is Old Labour; I think it’s old fashioned.

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A second commentator, Elaine Gibbons, rejected my conclusions (and also identified my gender incorrectly.  No offence taken):

‘Going forward, how will we care for our elderly?’ Mr. Olivarius-McAllister provides the most modern of answers to this rather old question: look to ‘the East,’ i.e. Asia, because we ‘the West,’ i.e. Britain and the rest of Old Europe, are in decline.

But the problem isn’t that the UK’s population is aging: the problem is that its birth rate is declining. If British women had more babies, our fortunes and those of the elderly would be reversed.

Asian countries like South Korea, China, and Japan have given up all hope of increasing birth rates in their own countries…The UK doesn’t need a ‘War on Dementia,’ or to massively expand its pensions budget by increasing taxes, or let itself be deluged with immigrants. It needs to embrace family values, value motherhood, and place more value on having a family.

The extent to which birth rates have declined is directly related to the extent that women have entered the workplace. Motherhood is a full-time job. You can’t work and do that job properly.

Gibbons is right that the UK’s declining birth rate has in part caused its population to age.  Gibbons is also right to observe that Japan and South Korea seem more or less resigned to the idea that, going forward, their populations will produce fewer babies than they once did.  However, Gibbons overlooks that in Europe, government policies often focus on trying to increase birth rates.  Indeed, over the last two decades, politicians and policy wonks have hatched an array of schemes to induce European women to reproduce: some good, some comical, and most bad.

Firmly in the “good” category is research undertaken by Letizia Mencarini, a demographer from the University of Turin.  In 2008, Mencarini and three colleagues published a study of women in Italy and the Netherlands.  They found that in comparison to their Dutch sisters, a smaller percentage of Italian women were in the workforce, yet Italy’s fertility rate was significantly lower than the Netherlands’ (1.33 as opposed to 1.73).  The sociological data that Mencarini collected confirmed her hypothesis: that women from societies with conservative attitudes toward gender roles were less likely to have children because they were already doing more than 75% of the household work.  “Put differently,” wrote Russell Shorto in a 2008 feature for the New York Times Magazine, “Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born.” As Mencarini herself has said, “It’s about how much the man participates in child care.”

Sweden and Germany have already put those insights into practice.  Sweden permits 13 months of parental leave, two months of it generously paid, exclusively for fathers.  (This, along with Sweden’s progressive, consent-based rape laws, and its pro-prostitute, anti-john prostitution policy, is among the reasons that Sweden tops the Gender Equality Index.)  Meanwhile, Chancellor Angela Merkel introduced a new parental allowance that pays any father or mother who chooses to stay home 67% of his or her income for the first year after a baby’s birth, capped at 1,800 Euros per month.  The results of this reform have given Mencarini’s hypothesis a second, swift, and sweet form of vindication: a fifth of German fathers now opt to stay home and care for their children; the number of births is rising.

Other efforts at demographic engineering fall in the ‘comical’ category.  In Greece, the belief that Athens’ polluted air was causing the steep decline of births achieved the status of shibboleth.  According to Shorto, this explanation became so entrenched that a manufacturing firm ran a series of radio advertisements that “promoted air-conditioners as a way to bring back Greek lust and Greek babies.”  An Italian campaign provoked warm, if amazed, laughter from the rest of the world, when in 2003 Rocco Falivena, the Mayor of a Laviano, a small rural town, announced he would pay every woman who agreed to give birth to and raise a child in his village 10,000 Euros.

Of course, Italy has produced a range of bad ideas too.  Prime Minister Silvio Burlesconi, for instance, apparently plans to repopulate Italy by fornicating with legions of its young women.  It is notable that unlike the Mayor of Laviano, Burlesconi is willing to pay women 10,000 euros for merely the opportunity to impregnate them, and should a baby ensue from that encounter, does not stipulate where it should be raised.