Family Matters

European Diary: Dubrovnik, October 2024

The European Conservatives and Reformists Party held a congress on the family and demographic change in Dubrovnik in Croatia on 18–20 October 2024. I was invited to give a talk about this highly relevant topic. I started by observing that in the West the elderly were becoming much more significant politically than before, for two reasons. They were becoming a larger proportion of the voters, and they had a greater propensity to vote than the younger generations. The explanation for the first factor was straightforward: it was the great extension of the average age coupled with lower fertility among the young. It was more difficult to explain the greater propensity to vote, but perhaps it was because the elderly were less busy and at the same time better informed about politics than the young.

Difference between Old and Young

I then observed that the outlook of the old tended to be different from that of the young. Indeed, in the Rhetoric Aristotle had argued that the young were guided by hope and the old by memories. Youth made innovations, whereas old age ensured continuity and stability. I would however put this contrast slightly differently in the context of politics. Young voters were guided by hope and old voters by fear. Shrewd politicians had to address both motives, as the examples of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher showed. Reagan warned his fellow Americans against communism, gaining the support of the elderly, while he articulated the American dream of getting on by hard work and thriftiness, appealing to the young. Thatcher fought resolutely against the labour unions’ abuse of power, which many British voters feared, while she applauded entrepreneurship and a property-owning democracy, which created opportunities for the young.

The elderly need not be a burden on society, I emphasised. There were no more reason for a conflict about scarce resources between the old and the young than for a struggle between the sexes. These groups had a common interest in economic growth, peace and prosperity. The elderly could contribute, both as producers and consumers. It was important to raise the retirement age and introduce more flexibility in the labour market. Indeed, people became fitter for some tasks with age. (I always say for example, being 71 years, that I am mature, not old.) In Iceland, the pension system was reformed in the late 1980s and early 1990s so that it is now sustainable. The pay-as-you-go system was abandoned, and instead people accumulated points through their own contributions. The Icelandic pension system is now one of the strongest in the world. With adequate pensions and the slow but sure accumulation of property the elderly became able to pay themselves for their care, while government should enable as much private provision of such care as possible (which would open up many opportunities for the young). At the same time, the elderly, with much more time at their disposal than the young are taking a much more active role than before in looking after their grandchildren, and sometimes their great-grandchildren.

The Importance of the Family

I then turned to the arguments philosophers and economists have offered for the family. First, of course, the family has in the past acted as a mutual insurance company. This is however a role which is less important today, with increasing prosperity. In the second place, the family is a much more efficient consumption unit than the individual, as economists stress, and a venue for the division of labour between the sexes (which has of course to be by mutual agreement). Thirdly, the family extends the individual’s time horizon in two directions. It extends it to the past by bringing up children according to time-tested principles, passed on from one generation to another, the civic virtues such as punctuality, diligence, honesty, good manners, and hygiene. It extends the time horizon to the future by encouraging parents to make provisions for their children, facilitating for their children the struggle of life. (This is one reason why inheritance taxes are undesirable. They are taxes on saving instead of spending; they are taxes on future-oriented or forward-looking behaviour.) When Lord Keynes was accused of promoting policies that might work better in the short than in the long run, he flippantly replied: ‘In the long run we are all dead.’ But of course our children live on, and our grandchildren.

Most importantly, however, the family gives our life a meaning, a sense of belonging. As the Danish poet Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig put it, a good marriage doubles our pleasure and halves our sorrow. Most individuals need someone with whom to share their lives. The family is like an extended self, providing a purpose in an age of uncertainty. It is perhaps the largest and most significant of the ‘little platoons’, as Edmund Burke called them, that stand between the individual and the state, protecting the individual and constraining the state. I told the audience in Dubrovnik that I had recently completed a book about conservative liberalism in the North and the South, comparing the national liberalism of Grundtvig and the liberal federalism of Italian economist Luigi Einaudi, a specialist on finance who served as Italy’s President in 1948–1955. Grundtvig, like Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, realised that the stability of the liberal order requires a flourishing civil society, with the family, a myriad of spontaneous associations, societies, clubs, and collectives, and a strong national identity. Therefore the liberal state should not be neutral. Instead, it should actively promote the family and other indispensable components of civil society.