Mimetic Desire & Declining Birthrates

In Chris Williamson’s interview with Louise Perry, the two discuss declining birthrates as an issue of mimetic desire. The idea is that, the less we see people around having babies, the less likely we are to do so ourselves:

This combines two things I’ve been thinking about recently: René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, and declining birthrates in the West. Perry points out that demographers have always assumed that people will just decide to have children at the replacement level of 2.1 per couple. The problem is, with contraception, couples must decide to have children (instead of accidentally as a consequence of sex). What we’ve found is that the decision to have children is not one we often arrive at rationally. There are always more reasons not to, and the most often cited reason is financial.

But I don’t buy this. One of the most predictable statistics is that as countries get richer, they have less children. The problem is not that we don’t have enough money, but that we just don’t want children. (The feminist theorist Germaine Greer goes as far as to say that we in the West ‘hate…