ROSS DOUTHAT wrote a column last Sunday on the recent decline in US birthrates that started out by observing that pro-family policies in places like Sweden and France lead to more births, a point that earned numerous cross-aisle plaudits from lefties. He then finished by arguing that lower birthrates are also in part "a symptom of late-modern exhaustion—a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe." That last point has earned him a week's worth of guff. Demographers explained that Mr Douthat's premise is misleading, and that total fertility rates may not have fallen: the decline in "birthrates" is in large part due the fact that women in their early 20s are having fewer babies while women in their late 30s are having more than ever before, and that there happens to be a demographic trough of women in their late 30s right now, so we're seeing fewer births. Feministsargued that calling for women to have more children, over and against their expressed preferences for fewer children, means treating them not entirely as fully responsible agents, and at least in part as brood sows. More or less everyone has pointed out that lower birthrates are the inevitable and universal outcome in societies where women achieve education, prosperity and control over their own lives. As a grace note, Matthew Yglesias writes that based on recent indie-rock lyrics, what hip young women seem to want isn't to live the life of a carefree, bohemian wastrel; it's to have a well-paid and respected job, which just doesn't seem very "decadent".

I subscribe to all of these critiques. Moreover, I'm not sure I understand what "decadence" is, which means that even though I've discharged my personal responsibility to achieve replacement-level fertility, I'm probably one of those decadent people whom Mr Douthat makes fun of in his follow-up post ("it's in the nature of decadent societies to deny that the category 'decadent' exists").

And yet I'm going to go out on a limb and admit that while I mostly disagree with Mr Douthat, I sort of partially agree with him.

By way of explanation, let me sketch the way the global relationship between birthrates and women's empowerment looks to me, based on what I've learned in the three countries where I've raised my kids so far. (Or rather, what my wife has learned. Women, regardless of country, almost never tell me what's really going on, perhaps because I'm too embarrassed to ask. They tell my wife, and she tells me.) Anyway, Togo, the west African country where we lived until my daughter was six months old, is fantastically pro-natalist, with a total fertility rate when we were there of 4.8 children per woman. This wasn't surprising; per capita GDP that year on a purchasing-power-parity basis was $660. People in very poor countries with high infant mortality rates have lots of kids. At the same time, the natalism in Togo didn't feel like a purely economic or epidemiological phenomenon. It felt like a sociocultural one, too. The women my wife worked with were extraordinarily pro-baby; they basically poked, prodded and nagged us into having kids, and once our daughter arrived, every day could have been take-your-daughter-to-work day. Nobody shied away from directing or disciplining other people's children. Having a village raise your children has its drawbacks, especially for women (nobody really likes to be poked and prodded quite that much), but it was certainly associated with a dramatic rise in my family's total fertility rate.

Vietnam is similarly pro-natal, but with major differences. First of all, while per capita GDP was similar to Togo's when we arrived there, it was rising at over 5% per year. You had a larger and larger class of well-off, well-educated women. At the same time, Vietnam's combination of a communist two-child policy and Confucian son preference put women of all classes in a viciously tight bind. Women were obliged to marry in their early 20s and produce a son to carry on their husband's family lineage, especially if that husband was himself an eldest son. (The fact that certain years were considered unlucky made the deadline pressure even more severe.) But because they only had two shots at producing a son, abortion rates were extremely high for women pregnant with girls who had already given birth to a girl. Women were obliged to move in with their husband's families after marriage; their mothers-in-law controlled fertility, pressuring them to produce that son, and young husbands were generally unwilling or unable to defend their wives from their mothers. For women who had spent a few years working and wanted to live modern, independent lives, the post-wedding plunge back into traditional family arrangements became a prison. One frequent recurring pattern was for young women to produce the necessary son and immediately apply to graduate programmes abroad, dumping the baby onto their mother-in-laws to raise. Vietnam's total fertility rate has been dropping steadily and has now fallen below the replacement rate, and it seems clear that as women gain increasing financial and social freedom it will plunge further, as it has in other wealthy Confucian societies like Singapore and Japan.

Finally, the Netherlands is a strange hybrid of progressive Scandinavia and conservative Germany. It's among the wealthiest countries in the world, and is consistently rated at or near the top in child-friendliness. But, counterintuitively, Dutch rates of women's participation in the labour force are quite low. The country does not have the kinds of extremely generous, unisex parental leave laws one finds in Scandinavia. Neither does it have the kind of universal government-supported daycare one finds in France. (A generous programme of daycare tax credits launched several years ago is now being scaled back, as it turned out to be too popular.) Rather, married women tend to take advantage of strong part-time labour laws to work three days per week. In general, the Dutch child welfare state still shows strong links to the paradigm established in the postwar years with support from Christian parties, in which the state subsidises mothers to stay at home and raise their children. This explains certain charming but infuriating anachronisms, such as the fact that many Dutch elementary schools still expect children to go home for lunch and return to school in the afternoon; parents must pay extra for in-class supervisors if they want their children to stay at school through lunchtime. The Netherlands' total fertility rate is 1.80, much higher than Germany's but not as high as Sweden's or France's, which are close to replacement rate. My general feeling is that there's a link between these middling fertility rates and the fact that while the Netherlands is a very child-friendly country, it's not a very working-mother-friendly country.

Okay, you say. The social and economic factors are clear. But where's the decadence?

Well, this is the part where I sort of agree with Mr Douthat. I think it's true that when a country is seeing low fertility rates, it can be associated with a society-wide sense of solipsism or futility. One common factor in Vietnam and Russia, another country where birthrates have cratered, is that over the past couple of decades both societies have lost what was once a very strong sense of national mission. In both countries, the old national narrative has been increasingly replaced by a creed of pure capitalist consumption. That creed provides no logic for the transmission of durable cross-generational values; some of the worst child-rearing I have ever seen was going on among newly rich Vietnamese. Of course, you could describe the problem via a different channel: in both countries, the collapse of the national narrative has predictably been associated with a sharp deterioration of the public sphere and a huge increase in corruption, which makes these societies worse places to raise children. But either way, I think there is an association between the transition in such countries to a value system that sees no higher goal than Ferraris, football clubs, mistresses and stupidly expensive wine, and a declining interest in fashioning a child-friendly society.

Finally, though, and I'm frankly hoping that some of my childless friends don't read this: I think, as a matter of personal sensibility and conviction, that having children is an extremely important part of interacting with the universe at a level that extends beyond your own immediate circumstances. There are, of course, many other ways one can achieve similar kinds of future-directed, altruistic engagement with what Dutch call the "whole-all". You can adopt. You can teach. You can give yourself over to some pioneering project, social, scientific or spiritual, that extends beyond any hope of renown for yourself and attempts to explore or shape a larger reality. But having children is one of the best ways of doing this, and one that is both unique and an obvious core aspect of what humans are designed to do. I feel bad for my friends who won't have the experience, and I feel, since they are my friends, that the universe has missed something through that absence. Some of those friends are sad about it too; others have decided they were lucky or smart not to have kids, just as most all of us decide we were lucky or smart to have ended up with the lives we've ended up with. Some of them never wanted kids, some really are better without kids, some have found ways to engage with the world that are every bit as deep. But for at least some friends, I feel they have missed a layer of depth, have not been made to think about how to live in a way deserving of being passed on to the future (though God knows most of us parents rarely meet that standard), and have not been forced into dialogue with the time travelers from that future, who will ultimately decide what to keep and what to throw away. I'm not sure I would call it "decadent" when a higher number of people don't engage with the future by having kids, but I certainly think it's a shame, and we ought to shift both social mores and corporate and government policy to make it easier for more people to do so.