Germany's truce with feminism (FT)

Until recently, new welfare benefits were taken as permanent advances for civilisation. Whether they involved earlier retirementages, more generous health plans or rights to education, they were what the French called acquis - promises that the next generation would be spared a problem that had bedevilled the last. But when the German government approved a new programme for Elterngeld (parents' money) on Wednesday, the reaction was muted.

Like all welfare innovations nowadays, Elterngeld addresses not an age-old problem but a new one, which has arguably been created by the welfare state itself. The new problem is that German women are having very few babies: 1.34 per woman, to be precise. Thanks to a number of frightening recent bestsellers, Germans have become aware that this national barrenness means the certain destruction of their welfare state over the next decades and the possible collapse of their society.

Ursula von der Leyen, the philoprogenitive family minister, hopes that Elterngeld will once again make childbearing look like a good deal. Starting next year,a mother who takes time off to have a baby will get two-thirds of her previous take-home pay - to a maximum benefit of €1,800 (£1,200) a month for up to 12 months - 14 months if both parents stop work for a bit.
The unemployed get €300 a month. It is a €4bn programme. So why is the public so lukewarm about it?

The leftwing objection to Elterngeld is that it is less egalitarian than the system it is replacing. Kindergeld (or child money), as the old system is called, would cover children up to age 27 in some cases, and other side-benefits could be tapped along with it. Jobless new mothers, who could collect €300 a month for two years under the present system, will only collect for half as long in future. The government made some adjustments to the new plan last week that soften the blow for low earners. But of the 620,000 new families covered annually by the measure, 250,000 will be worse off. Some rank-and-file Christian Democrats (CDU) are upset because Kindergeld was one of their party's proudest achievements. Now their own CDU chancellor, Angela Merkel, has abandoned it for Elterngeld, a more capitalistic plan that was developed by their Social Democratic (SPD) coalition partners and rivals. (Clearly, politicians' attitude towards the welfare state depends more on their era than on their party: Clinton, Blair and Schröder have proved less socialist than Eisenhower, Macmillan and Adenauer.)

But there is also a rightwing objection. It is that, nice though family formation is, Elterngeld is going to backfire. The child-averse psychology that the law seeks to short-circuit is a complex one. Poorer people may forgo children because the cost is too high. But people with good jobs are reluctant to have children, too, because the opportunity cost of stopping work is too high. In theory, Elterngeld is tailored to address this problem because the value of its benefit rises along with a would-be mother's earning power. But there are instances where its incentives may work to delay childbearing. Consider a 28-year-old married woman in law school or medical school. If she has the baby she wants, she will collect only the €300-a-month minimum, while the family will likely still be too poor to have the father stay home to "earn" the two supplemental months. Betterto hold off for a few more years. Then, rather than get the €300 benefit for 12 months (€3,600), the family can get the €1,800 benefit for 14 (€25,200).

And what of the women who do not ever want to enter the workplace? In a grumpily brilliant attack on Elterngeld, Stefan Dietrich of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung coined the term Nurhausfrau ("onlyahousewife") to describe the contempt that the paltry €300 payout signals for those women who stay at home and raise children. Mr Dietrich has a point. Work in the household - whether childcare or cleaning - is the last socially useful work that is not given a dollar value. The moment it is, then parents will be seen as woefully undercompensated for what they do.

But that is a different argument. The present German family-policy debate does not resemble the ones that raged until recently in almost all western countries, with two ideals of motherhood battling it out. The needs of working mothers (for more daycare) used to be pitted against those of non-working mothers (usually for tax relief). Elterngeld aims neither to ease the burden on the working mother, nor to lift the stigma on the stay-at-home one. It aims to get women who would not otherwise have children to have them. Like most emergency measures, Elterngeld takes the situation as it exists, not as it ought to be. That is why it declares a truce with feminism's ideal of women in the workplace.

That truce may be temporary. There are deeper conflicts that the German policy papers over. Through the feminist decades, women's wishes for society have been in perfect harmony with businessmen's wishes for the economy. Everyone seemed to benefit from women's eagerness to take their rightful spots in the workplace. It meant more manpower, lower labour costs and more investment in education. You could have your cake and eat it. But now an important western country has shown itself willing to pay billions to steer women out of the workplace and into childbearing, if only for a short time. We are clearly in a new era, marked by a recognition that building the society we want is going to cost us part of our standard of living - or that our standard of living can only be maintained at the cost of damage to society.

Elterngeld reflects this thinking more clearly than any government programme yet. It is a new set of tradeoffs, not a new set of benefits. We will see a lot more government programmes like it.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006