The world has seen uncertainty before, so why is this time different? One possibility is that we live in an era of “polycrisis” — a term coined in the 1990s by the philosopher Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern to describe the interplay of many crises at once. For the particular question of having a family, among the many crises, the Great Recession may have been particularly consequential. “It changed the world,” said Chiara Ludovica Comolli, a demography professor at the University of Bologna. It “produced such levels of inequalities that the relationship between people and between groups, it was completely altered.”
Ms. Comolli has been studying how economic uncertainty rippled through the social sphere, eroding social trust and spurring the rise of radical right-wing parties, and how those changes in turn affect fertility. In Sweden, the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats have talked about protecting the family and increasing child allowances. But Ms. Comolli found that in towns and cities where the party was gaining popularity, birthrates actually fell. Highly educated women, whom the researchers described as most likely to feel alienated by their neighbors’ support for the radical right, were especially likely to forgo having a child.
The Great Recession’s outsize impact may also be due to its status as the first economic crisis of the era of nonstop digital information deluge, which rendered it, and the sense of dread it engendered, all but inescapable, even for people not financially affected. The same goes for natural disasters, political upheaval and war: In a global world, no one is insulated. “It’s not just your own uncertainty, but it’s that you get all the uncertainty around you as well,” said Trude Lappegård, a sociology professor at the University of Oslo. “It’s difficult to disentangle what concerns you and what possibly can concern you, and what’s concerning other people.”
Or as Axel Peter Kristensen, who did his graduate research with Ms. Lappegård, put it when we spoke last summer, “Which uncertainty matters? Is it the one that’s very close to you? Is it the one that is on a larger abstract scale? Is it one that’s here in Europe? Or is it in Norway?”
Mr. Kristensen himself has a partner and a job and owns a small apartment in Oslo, but at 33, he is not yet a parent. He contrasted his life course with that of his parents, who had all three of their children by their early 30s. At the time, Mr. Kristensen’s mother was training to be a nurse, and his father was a carpenter. From today’s vantage point, theirs was not “a secure situation — renting, not having that much money,” he said. “But they still felt that, of course, we’re going to have children.” Mr. Kristensen’s mother intended to pursue education, and his parents wanted to eventually buy a home, but in that era, kids were not viewed as obstacles to achieving those goals. “They were not postponing birth. They were just doing it at the same time.”
