Boris Johnson sees a "blessing" in falling British births. Britain's grandsons don't.
Young men and young women across the political spectrum are losing the same future. Their elders are celebrating and "ignoring the doom mongers"
Now? Boris Johnson opens his latest Daily Mail column with bells tolling in Tuscany for far more funerals than weddings, kindergarten playgrounds eerily deserted in Tokyo, and bus routes cancelled across Europe as elderly passengers take “their last subsidised freedom pass to the sky.” He’s clearly proud of the fact that his party, post the Great Recession, had smothered UK’s nascent baby boom in the crib. Can’t have those pesky brats having their own brats after all.
Johnson is still among the most effective political journalists writing in English, and this column is him at the top of his form. The prose is fluid. The imagery lands. The dark humour earns its place. He’s making a contestable claim feel obvious through pure rhythm, and the reader is enrolled before they notice there is one.
His argument is that the falling birth rate isn’t a crisis but a blessing. The planet will thank us. The doom-mongers should butt out. The state should let people decide. On a first reading, it’s persuasive.
Now picture two households Johnson’s prose doesn’t visit.
A couple in their early seventies, in a paid-off four-bedroom house in Surrey. They bought it in 1987. The mortgage cleared a decade ago. The house is worth, today, somewhere north of £900,000. Their state pension arrived this morning, indexed by the triple lock, up another 4.1 per cent on last year. They aren’t rich. They’re comfortable. Their lives are working.
Their grandson is twenty-eight, with a 2:1 from a redbrick and six years of post-graduation work history without a permanent contract in any of them. He works through an app; warehouse shifts in Park Royal, courier runs, occasional fortnights of nothing. Last month he made £1,420. The month before, £820. He shares a flat in Walthamstow (still hopes to find a proper gig one day) and pays £760 in rent. He hasn’t been on a third date in eighteen months; no personal flat to bring someone back to, no schedule to plan around, no future he can compress into a sentence on an app. He’s the same age his grandfather was when he had his second child. He doesn’t think he’s falling behind. He thinks the country has moved past the point at which what he’s doing counts as starting a life.
Both households are doing exactly what people in their situation do. One is going well. One is failing. They’re connected. Johnson’s bells toll in Tuscany. They also toll, more quietly, over every son, grandson, and great grandson who never quite started.
Britain isn’t the first country to have this argument with itself
How we explain why the grandson hasn’t started determines what we do next. If he’s freely chosen not to want what his grandfather wanted, the policy response is to do nothing. Accept the transition. Plan for a smaller, older Britain. Adjust at the margins.
If he wanted to launch and couldn’t, the response is the opposite. We have to ask which costs were imposed, by whom, and to whose benefit: whether the policies that made his grandfather’s house worth £900,000 are the same policies that hollowed out the floor under his entry-level career.
The two diagnoses produce opposite governments. The first sees a generation living differently. The second sees a generation taxed by an arrangement that was never put to a vote. Pension solvency, productivity, housing reform, the welfare state, and most concretely whether the grandson ever crosses into the life that surveys say he still wants: none of these stakes are abstract.
The cultural story, and why it doesn’t hold
The dominant explanation for falling Western birth rates is cultural. Women have entered higher education and the workforce in numbers their grandmothers couldn’t match. Marriage has been delayed or abandoned. Religious observance has weakened. Johnson gives this story its sunniest reading: the human population, he writes, is “organically self-regulating, seeking a better balance with Nature.”
Trouble is that the cultural-shift theory cannot absorb one specific, well-documented finding: desired fertility, what people say they want when surveyed, has barely fallen. Across the OECD, the modal answer to “how many children would you like to have?” remains two or three, almost identical to 1970. Achieved fertility has fallen sharply. The gap between what people want and what they get is the largest ever measured.
If people had simply changed their minds about children, the survey numbers would have fallen with the birth numbers. They haven’t.
Cultural change is also very suspect. British women were having multi-decade record breaking numbers of kids during the late 00s, with Gen X having more kids than their Boomer counterparts. The ‘00s was also a time of ever increasing education and women in the workforce. So, it clearly isn’t caused by women having degrees and careers.
What changed about the price?
France and Britain, side by side
France and Britain are, by every variable the cultural theory tracks, the same kind of country. Rich Western European democracies. Comparable women’s labour-force participation. Comparable secular trends. The same global currents. By the theory, they should be on the same demographic trajectory.
For two decades they weren’t. France’s TFR held above 1.8 from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, among the highest in Europe. Britain’s drifted down toward 1.4. A large gap, and on the cultural theory inexplicable.
From the early twentieth century, consolidated in the post-war settlement under the Conseil National de la Résistance, France ran a deliberate structural pronatal regime. It wasn’t cash bonuses or Mussolini-style rhetoric. It was a coherent system. Two components carried most of the load. The first was universal heavily-subsidised crèche provision from infancy. The second was the quotient familial, a tax code that divided households by number of children, so a French family with three children paid significantly less income tax than the same family with one. Universal allocations familiales paid every family regardless of income. The French state treated family formation as infrastructure. Lyman Stone, the leading conservative demographer of pronatal policy effectiveness, titles his analysis plainly: Does Pronatal Policy Work? It Did in France.
The regime is currently being dismantled, and the dismantling has a name: Emmanuel Macron. The cuts began under François Hollande, where Macron served first as deputy chief of staff (2012–2014) and then as Minister of Economy (2014–2016). The quotient familial cap was lowered twice, from €2,336 to €1,500. The universality of allocations familiales, established in 1946, was broken in 2015 by income-based modulation. The Cour des comptes quantified the cumulative impact at €3.3 billion. As President from 2017, Macron extended these cuts. In 2024, despite proclaiming a réarmement démographique, he reduced congé parental from three years to three months. APLs were cut in 2017, frozen in 2018. The 2018 loi ELAN began the privatisation of HLM stock, gutting the SRU social-housing quota. The 2017 Ordonnances Macron expanded fixed-term contracts, capped prud’hommes wrongful-dismissal awards, and introduced the CDI de chantier, a project-based “permanent” contract paying no prime de précarité.
France’s TFR has fallen from 2.0 in 2014 to 1.62 in 2024, a 20 per cent collapse in a decade. 663,000 children were born in France in 2024, the lowest figure since the Second World War, and for the first time since 1945 France recorded more deaths than births in the year to May 2025. INED’s Generations and Gender survey shows ideal family size dropped from 2.5 children in 2005 to 1.9 in 2024. The regime worked while intact; France’s collapse is what the structural thesis predicts when you take it apart.
Britain ran the inversion for longer, and from earlier. Childcare costs rose from roughly 40 per cent of the total cost of raising a child in 2012 to around 60 per cent today, among the highest net rates in the OECD. The planning regime restricted housing supply while existing-home prices rose by an average of £100,000 per home in the seven years before 2008, and continued rising afterward. Real wages stagnated from 2007 onward. The under-thirty-five cohort, which owned 3.2 per cent of the country’s housing stock in 2008, hasn’t recovered share since. A young British family pays for the same inputs a young French family pays for, gets less help, earns roughly the same.
A country’s fertility mechanism operates at two stages. The first is the launch (whether a young couple ever has a first child), and the strongest individual-level predictor here is employment stability, with stronger effects for men than for women. Alderotti, Vignoli, Baccini and Matysiak’s Demography meta-analysis (2021) finds men’s unemployment the single most fertility-suppressive labour-market condition, with the effect intensifying since the Great Recession and biting hardest where welfare protection is weakest. German workers on fixed-term contracts have a twenty-percentage-point lower probability of childbearing than those on permanent contracts, and the gap persists more than a decade after labour-market entry. The McDonald’s shift, the zero-hours job, the CDI de chantier: these don’t just pay less. They suppress launch.
The second stage is parity progression (whether a couple has a second, third, or fourth child), and here the conventional wisdom is wrong. Doepke, Hannusch, Kindermann and Tertilt’s The Economics of Fertility: A New Era (CEPR summary) documents that the long-standing negative correlation between income and fertility has flattened or reversed across the rich world. Where structural conditions allow, higher income now predicts more children, not fewer. The facilitating conditions (supportive family policy, cooperative fathers, favourable norms, labour markets that don’t punish parenthood) are precisely the levers France pulled until 2014, and Britain hasn’t pulled this century. Cap benefits at the second child, freeze working-age welfare, leave childcare uncovered, end the universality of allocations familiales, and you suppress parity progression.
Now Hungary, the case Johnson names directly. He calls it a failure. The data don’t. Hungary’s TFR rose from 1.25 in 2010 to 1.59 in 2021 (when the COVID Crisis was in full swing and before Europe’s mini oil shock). Critics correctly note period TFR is noisy and can reflect timing rather than completed family size. Stone responds with tempo-and-parity-adjusted fertility (the gold-standard measure that strips out timing effects) and finds Hungary one of only two countries (Slovakia is the other) with documented increases in completed cohort fertility since 2014. His difference-in-differences analysis of seventeen countries’ pronatal interventions from 2000 to 2025 finds an average effect of 0.09 to 0.18 additional births per woman, persisting more than a decade. Mongolia, where pronatal incentives were expanded and later eroded with fertility moving correspondingly each time, is the cleanest natural experiment in the literature.
Cash baby-bonuses work; it’s more of a question if the support for said policy is sustained, structural family-policy regimes producing durable fertility differences over time. France-before-Macron is the long-run version. Hungary is the targeted-intervention version. France-after-Macron and Britain are these regimes running in reverse, producing the convergent outcome we now see.
The cultural theory can’t explain any of these gaps. The structural theory can. It’s also the one almost no one in the relevant coalitions is willing to act on.
Generational Asymmetry
The grandson in Section 1 isn’t a hypothetical, and he isn’t the dramatic case. He’s an example of a post-2008 young British man without an elite-credential pathway. The literature has spent thirty years explaining why his case is asymmetric: the man’s economic position is the load-bearing variable in whether a couple ever crosses into family formation.
Alderotti meta-analysis tucks this in carefully: men’s unemployment is the single most fertility-suppressive labour-market condition, with effects measurably stronger than women’s. The mechanism has a long pedigree, going back to William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears (1996), which argued that disappearing male wage jobs were the load-bearing cause of family disintegration in inner-city Chicago. Becker’s specialization model gives a complementary economic account.
Autor, Dorn and Hanson identified this cleanly. In When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Young Men (2019) (yes yes, I know it using the same name as WJW’s When Work Disappears), they exploited the gender-specific composition of the China trade shock. Regions hit by male-intensive industry shocks saw marriage fall, fertility fall, and the share of unwed mothers and below-poverty single-parent households rise. Regions hit by female-intensive shocks saw the opposite. Same external shock, opposite domestic effects, depending on which side of the household economy got hit. The asymmetry isn’t a curiosity. It’s the mechanism. Where you gut the male wage floor, the family doesn’t form. The same paper documents a differential rise in male premature mortality from drugs and alcohol in the affected regions: Case and Deaton’s deaths-of-despair trajectory, traced to the same labour-market shock that suppressed launch.
What did Britain do, post-2008, to the male wage floor?
Real average weekly earnings didn’t return to their April 2008 level until 2024, sixteen years of stagnation unprecedented in modern peacetime. Young men under thirty-five bore disproportionately more of this than other groups, because the contraction landed on the rungs they were trying to climb. Zero-hours contracts, by 2024 the main job for over a million UK workers, are concentrated among the young and overrepresented in male-dominated low-skill sectors. The Resolution Foundation reports job mobility (the engine of early-career wage growth) is lower than in the 1980s. Apprenticeship completions in male-coded trades fell across the 2010s as further-education funding for non-academic pathways was gutted under austerity. A redbrick degree, once a near-guarantee of a salaried entry-level rung, no longer reliably opens the door. Graduate vacancies in 2025 fell to their lowest level since 2018.
By February 2026, 957,000 young people in the UK were not in employment, education, or training, up by a quarter of a million in three years, with the increase concentrated among young men. Economic inactivity due to ill-health among working-age men under thirty-five has roughly doubled since 2019. Some is pandemic tail; most is structural: a generation taught to expect the labour market has no place for them.
This is darker than the wage data alone. Drug-poisoning deaths in England and Wales rose 81.5 per cent between 2012 and 2022, with men accounting for the overwhelming majority. The 2024 male suicide rate is the highest since 1999, and suicide remains the leading cause of death for British men under fifty. Scotland, hit hardest by deindustrialisation, now has the highest drug-death rate in Europe, with the excess concentrated in deprived male cohorts under forty-five. The pattern Case and Deaton documented in West Virginia is the pattern Wilson documented in 1980s Chicago is the pattern now visible in Blackpool, Glasgow, and the post-industrial North-East. Different accents, same shock.
The grandson is, statistically, on a less stable contract than female graduates of his cohort, and earns less in real terms than his grandfather did at the same age. He is more likely to be NEET than a female peer, and much more likely to die by suicide, drugs, or alcohol before forty than any recent cohort of British men. He is also the variable on which any future decision to have a child most heavily depends. Women want stable partners at the end of the day!
This is why he hasn’t been on a third date in eighteen months, and why telling him to relax (telling him the falling birth rate is “organically self-regulating”) is so glib. The architecture suppressed family formation by dismantling the floor under the people whose economic stability is the strongest individual-level predictor of whether a family ever begins. The grandson’s empty schedule is its signature.
A pronatalist column that doesn’t see this isn’t seeing the problem. Johnson reads the grandson’s stalled life as preference. It is, more often, the absence of a launch, and the launch was sabotaged at the male economic position. No British minister announced that the goal was to immiserate young working-class men. The two-child cap, the fixed-term contract regime, the housing shortage, the wage stagnation, the gutting of further-education funding for non-academic trades: each was defended on its own terms. Their joint product is a cohort of young men ground down at the point in life they would, in any previous British generation, have been earning enough to become someone’s husband. Macron’s France ran the same play in another tongue. The Ordonnances Macron read almost as if designed to suppress male launch directly: project-based contracts paying no precariousness premium, weakened wrongful-dismissal protection, hitting precisely the male-dominated trades.
There’s one more thing the structural literature won’t quite say. Taxing the inputs to family formation produces fewer families. It also produces a generation of men who don’t see what’s happening to them as a structural condition. They see it as personal failure. They shouldn’t blame themselves; the architecture is doing the work. But the architecture is invisible by design, and the failure is concrete. A number of them go looking for somebody to blame. The post-2010 turn in young male political behaviour across the rich democracies (toward Trump, AfD, Le Pen, Reform) reads at one level as a generation of men who can feel a floor missing under their feet and have been offered no honest account of who removed it. The far right tells them a story. It’s a wrong story, and the centre-left coalitions that nominally oppose it haven’t told them a better one. Johnson and his contemporaries are complicit in the demographic outcome, and in the political one downstream of it.
That’s the darker current under the falling birth rate. Underneath the demographic numbers, a generation of men is being processed by a policy regime that benefits older asset-holders into a condition the polite analyses don’t quite want to name. Demographers call it suppressed launch. Sociologists call it deaths of despair. The men themselves say the country has moved on without them. They are right.
Patterns repeat across the rich world
The France-Britain comparison doesn’t stand alone. It sits inside a pattern documented across the rich democracies.
The intergenerational wealth gap isn’t a British peculiarity. The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation arrive independently at the same finding: household wealth roughly doubled between the 1990s and 2020s, with gains going overwhelmingly to older asset-holding cohorts. UK 25-to-34-year-olds would need to become five and a half times wealthier over the next thirty years to match the wealth of the typical baby boomer at the same age. Those born in the 1980s are on track for lower rates of homeownership than any UK cohort since the 1930s.
The same shape appears across the United States, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. Wherever housing functions as the primary retirement asset and post-2008 QE was layered onto an asset-skewed economy while pensioner benefits were ringfenced, the redistribution followed. The British settlement is the most aggressive version. France is now the same regime in French.
Every country running this version reports the same thing about its young people: delayed family formation, widening gaps between desired and actual fertility, falling birth rates the cultural narrative cannot account for. There’s nothing anomalous about the British case. It’s what every other rich democracy is now becoming, in different accents.
Austerity architecture, admitted
George Osborne, who as Chancellor presided over the British post-2008 settlement, was once asked about the distributional effects of QE. His answer was unusually candid: “[QE’s] purpose is that people who already have something like a house or a pension or some shares will see the value of those things go up. That’s what the policy is designed to do and it feels unfair because the people who don’t have those things aren’t getting the benefits of the policy.”
That’s the architect explaining what he built. Were the admission about almost anything else, it would have made front pages; because it was about quantitative easing, the line lived briefly in the financial pages and disappeared. The policy was intended to inflate the asset base of those who already held one. We owe him the courtesy of believing him.
QE alone doesn’t produce the regime; QE was paired with austerity, and we should be more precise about what that austerity was. The cuts of the 2010s weren’t uniform. Pensioner benefits were ringfenced and indexed upward by the triple lock. Working-age welfare, social housebuilding, childcare subsidies, housing benefit, further-education funding, local-authority youth services: those were defunded. The LSE Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion showed services directed at young people absorbed the largest share of cuts while transfers to retired households were largely protected. The European Youth Forum’s Generation Austerity report documented the same pattern across Europe. What was sold as fiscal discipline was, in distributional fact, Youth Austerity: a contraction whose burden was selected by age. Greece, Spain, Italy ran their own variants under EU rules. The US ran a softer version through the housing crash and state-level cuts. France ran its own, slowly under Hollande and aggressively under Macron. Everywhere the same shape: asset support upward, contraction across the working-age life-course.
Why does this austerity architecture persist? Because the actors operating it respond to incentives. Older voters turn out at high rates, are more numerous in most rich democracies through at least 2040, hold assets whose value is sensitive to policy, and are the median voter on most distributional questions. They vote their interest. A homeowner who paid off her mortgage in 1995 has nothing to gain from cheaper housing in 2026 and a great deal to lose. This isn’t villainy on her part. It’s how coalitions work. Meloni’s pronatalist rhetoric is loud, her policy quiet, because the policy that would help would cost her own coalition. Johnson’s “let people decide” is the same trick in English.
Johnson’s record while in office is the most damaging thing about his article. On employment stability, the lever academic research identifies as the strongest predictor of whether a couple ever has a first child, his government oversaw a record expansion of zero-hours contracts: over a million UK workers were on them as their main job by 2024, the highest level on record, disproportionately concentrated among the young. On family benefits, the lever for parity progression, his government retained Osborne’s two-child benefit cap, the most explicitly anti-pronatal piece of legislation in modern British history. On housing supply, his 2020 Planning for the Future white paper, which would have introduced zonal planning to break the local-veto regime, was abandoned in 2021 under backbench pressure following the Chesham and Amersham by-election. The 300,000 homes annual target was scrapped under his successor for the same coalitional reason. The man writing in 2026 to tell young people to relax about birth rates is the man who held the levers academic research identifies as causal, and chose, at the political moment of decision, not to pull them.
Macron is the same story in another language. The pronatalist rhetoric is loud: réarmement démographique, the emphatic concern for la natalité française. The policy runs the other way: a quotient familial cap lowered twice while Macron was Hollande’s deputy chief of staff, the universality of allocations familiales broken under his watch as Minister of Economy, APLs slashed and frozen, the Ordonnances Macron expanding fixed-term and project-based contracts, congé parental cut from three years to three months. The French TFR responded by collapsing on the schedule the structural literature would predict.
The verdict
The British and French birth rates are now falling at the same rate, with at least four distinguishable causes. The deepest is structural: aging democracies, once their median voter passes a certain age, function as coalitions of asset-holders and produce policy that protects assets at the expense of the inputs to family formation. Below that, post-2008 monetary and fiscal policy converted the structural advantage into outcome: QE inflated the assets the older cohort owned, Youth Austerity cut the investment the younger cohort needed, and the cut fell asymmetrically on young men. Below that sit specific national choices: the triple lock, the two-child cap, the broken universality of allocations familiales, the Ordonnances Macron. Each could have been made differently. Hungary made some of them differently and got a different birth rate. The most contingent layer is rhetorical: Johnson’s column, Macron’s réarmement démographiquespeeches, a senior member of the winning cohort telling the losing cohort that everything is fine.
Fix only the rhetoric and you change nothing. Fix the structure and you fix the rest.
This is, finally, a piece about young people, so let me close by speaking to them directly.
What’s being denied to your generation is the oldest material precondition for romance: a flat with a second bedroom, a contract that lasts past Christmas, a future you can compress into a sentence for someone you might want to spend it with. The desire is real. Surveys across the rich democracies keep returning the same answer: young people still want partnership, still want children, still want roughly what their grandparents had. What’s denied is the material floor on which any of that gets built. The grandfather had his second child at twenty-eight because the labour market handed him the platform. The grandson on a zero-hours contract doesn’t get the platform, and so doesn’t get the second date.
You may be a conservative young man who reads Johnson and finds parts of his diagnosis on welfare correct. You may be a centrist young woman who voted Macron in 2017 because he seemed like the adult in the room. You may be a young progressive who turned out for Sánchez or Starmer or Harris because the alternatives looked openly cruel. The political differences between you are real. The material situation underneath them is identical, and the older members of each of your coalitions know it.
The conservative young man’s preferred mix won’t solve his housing problem if his coalition’s older voters don’t want lower house prices. Johnson has held the levers and didn’t pull them. Trump won 54 per cent of young American men in 2024 on the promise of letting them launch; eighteen months in, his approval among Gen Z sits in the mid-twenties, with job market, cost of living and healthcare cited as the breaks.
The centrist young woman’s preferred mix won’t fix her childcare problem if Macron is the centrist who lowered the quotient familial cap, broke universal allocations familiales, slashed APLs, and cut congé parental from three years to three months.
The young progressive’s preferred mix is, as it happens, what the structural literature actually endorses; the centre-left incumbents aren’t delivering it. Sánchez’s PSOE-Sumar government has presided over a “booming economy with falling unemployment” alongside an affordable-housing crisis that has gutted young Spaniards’ life prospects, and the young Spanish vote has fragmented across the radical left, Vox, and abstention. Germany’s SPD watched young men under twenty-four make AfD their preferred party in 2024. Starmer’s government is bleeding the under-thirty vote.
If you’re under thirty-five, you’ve watched your peers cycle through these vehicles. They voted left in 2017, centrist in 2019, hard right in 2024, and many have already turned on the right by 2026. The pattern isn’t stupidity. It’s a generation looking for the political vehicle whose elders will let them have what their grandparents had: a job, a flat, a partner, a child, a future they can put into a sentence. They keep moving, and the movement keeps being read as cultural noise. It isn’t noise. It’s the only signal a generation that has been told to relax has left to send.
The older members of every camp share something their disagreements obscure: they view your generation as economically expendable. The Tory pensioner, the PSOE pensioner, the SPD pensioner, the homeowner among American Democrats: different in their politics, identical in their economic incidence. They will tolerate your loss before their own. They are not lying when they tell you the falling birth rate is a blessing, that you should relax. They are telling you the truth. Why bother after all? Nothing the youth can do to stop them.
You are not in a coalition with the pensioners who out-vote you. The young Vox voter in Andalusia, the young Reform voter in Hartlepool, the young Mélenchon voter in Marseille, the young Trump voter who has already turned away from him: their differences are political and worth arguing about. Their material situation is the same. So is the future their elders are quietly content to let them lose.