"Call this the Joe Biden-baby-boom hypothesis, which we may be about to test: If you spend on family benefits and run the economy hot enough, maybe fertility rates will finally begin to float back up.
This is the ideal scenario for pronatalist liberals, because it would mean more kids without more social conservatism. The second scenario for a fertility recovery, though, involves exactly that: a kind of neo-traditionalist turn, answering the socially liberal swing of the last two decades, that leads to people marrying earlier and having more kids for reasons of values rather than just economics.... [A] third possibility is that a deep fertility decline is more likely to end gradually, through a kind of slow selection process rather than abrupt conversion.
By selection I mean that as fewer people have children, the ones who do have kids will be an increasingly distinctive population — not specifically conservative or religious, necessarily, but couples who will have written new scripts for romance, discovered new models for child rearing and burden-sharing, in a cultural and technological landscape that’s torn the older models up.
So then the children and grandchildren of these trailblazers, inheriting both the new models for family formation and the world itself, would be the ones who drive some future baby boom."
From "How Does a Baby Bust End?/Three scenarios for a more fertile American future." by Ross Douthat (NYT).
From the comments at the NYT: "It should tell Mr. Douthat something that most of the top comments are from women. Guess what. Women, given any kind of agency at all--which includes education and the ability to support oneself--don't want to have hordes of kids. And if there is anything the planet doesn't need, it's more humans than existing sociopolitical forces are already grinding out. The real problem is to empower those women in oppressive, patriarchal, monotheistic cultures to have the economic, psychological, and political power to say NO more kids than they themselves want. Not to figure out how to con Caucasians (because that's Douthat's subtext) into having more."
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93 comments:
We can spend unlimited money on account of the bill will never come due and there will never be unintended consequences. Just ask Kruggers. Maybe handing out money would work if you had an isolated economy, but if your economy isn’t set up to produce more stuff, the money will just flow overseas, it seems to me. But I don’t even think that that is true. Indians stopped accepting wampum as payment when the whites started mass producing it.
Trump is the first president in a long time to create a booming economy where the gains were widely shared... too widely. He was driving up the cost of labor by stanching the flow of illicit labor from across the border, and he had to be stopped. So good luck thinking that the donor class who fortified the election for Biden has any stomach for policies that help the working poor gain better wages without at the same time destroying jobs, which is what trying to overthrow the law of supply and demand with high minimum wages effectively does.
I guess the Indians were producing as many beaver pelts as they could, and printing more wampum wasn’t going to create more beaver, so prices had to adjust until the currency became worthless.
The opening 5 minutes of Idiocracy might be the most prophetic scene in the history of cinema. The right people will never have enough children, too busy
WUT? The world doesn't need more people, but the USA does? Landfills, aquifers imperiled by population boom in the 70's, 80's and 90s are now up for grabs. The border crossers gonna recycle their wastes appropriately? You ever read Mexifornia?
Biden/Harris blackout guarantees the revolution will not be televised.
Jeff Vader... That is true. Robocop spelled it out pretty well too.
pronatalist liberals,
That’s an interesting term, but it doesn’t describe anything that exists in the real world. As demonstrated by the included comment. The rest of the excerpt is equally fantastical. I guess these are the lies you have to tell yourself to be the house conservative at a leftist rag like the New York Times.
Socio-engineering society is doomed to failure. Human behavior always bypasses whatever goal you are trying to achieve. Societies biggest failure is education; educate children to the best of our ability, giving them tools to support themselves, and subsequently a family, in a modern society, and see what happens.
Stop seeing everything as a problem to be solved.
If you want people to have fewer children, make them richer. As capitalism continues to lift the world’s population out of poverty, global birth rates will come down. Unless one believes that Earth has an unlimited carrying capacity for humans this is a good thing (not to mention the benefits of less poverty). Sooner or later we will want a stasis where the number of humans dying equals the number being born — and we don’t want to be goosing that process along with wars and famines.
It's cute they believe the administration can choose to have a "hot" economy.
...even if it was a choice, the administration isn't creating the right incentives. printing money won't do it...
Even during the Obama administration there were people who understood productivity.
This year and last year ran higher deficits than 1945.
1945.
And our intelligentsia talk about more spending, more giving to our own population.
Where do they think today's deficits are coming from? It's not from foreign wars or rebuilding other countries - this is all from "giving" to our own population.
Women, given any kind of agency at all--which includes education and the ability to support oneself--don't want to have hordes of kids
Serious question
To a "pronatal Liberal", What constitutes a "horde" of kids?
3?
2?
1?
In 1945, not to make light of what happened or to suggest that this was the reason, but those deficits went to destroying our economic competition, so they were economically manageable in the long run. Now they will just mean that as our currency becomes worthless, we will be forced to surrender our assets to countries like China, who will have hoovered up all of the excess money and will use it to buy our land, our minerals, etc, etc. We will be forced to pay at some point with something of real value.
"To a "pronatal Liberal", What constitutes a "horde" of kids?"
Hunter Biden.
Marriage is not a good deal for men. No-fault divorce takes all their savings.
I went to a friend's son's wedding last Saturday
They are Baptists... Bible is the literal Word of GOD Baptists
The small familys there had only (only!) 2 kids... most had 4 or more
Of you Liberals out there, how many grandkids do you have?
Women would be happy to have children if they weren’t forced to work jobs. Making women work jobs is what has destroyed fertility, not education. No, they would not choose to have seven or ten or anything like that, but two or three, in economic security? Sure. The problem is that you can’t give them economic security by assigning them ones and zeros in a computer memory bank and claiming that they will have lasting value. Only for a short while at the beginning when there are a lot of people who don’t understand the game going on, so they will still think the “money” has value.
It’s like all of those pissed off Enron employees who were angry they weren’t given time to unload their worthless stock on unsuspecting buyers, there is a short period of unsuspecting consumers that give the illusion of effectiveness at printing money.
The good news is that NY Times readers will be extinct in a couple of generations.
Martin, may I introduce Joanna?
Hello, Joanna. I'm going through a vicious divorce at the moment and will soon be penniless, so, from your point of view, what would be the point?
Joanna, he's famously awful.
Closed circuit (2013)
Women have decided they'd rather be married to, and provided for by, the government rather than husbands.
The real problem is to empower those women in oppressive, patriarchal, monotheistic cultures to have the economic, psychological, and political power to say NO more kids than they themselves want.
The real problem is people who use empower, oppressive, patriarchal, and monotheistic in the same sentence. Furthermore, people who use the phrase they themselves ought to be restricted to entry-level employment in the foodservice industry for the good of society at large.
How does a baby bust end?
Nobody had the talk with the administration, apparently...
If you wanted a long economic expansion whose gains are widely shared, you should have kept the last guy.
Women, given any kind of agency at all--which includes education and the ability to support oneself--don't want to have hordes of kids.
Most women, if given the opportunity, would have more kids than they currently do. Most women want to be mothers, not corporate executives or fighter pilots or any of that other feminist bullshit.
The baby bust ends when young women prefer to have a family over striving for a VP job somewhere in the future. Too many 40 year old single women who are bemoaning their lives right now. There are many happy women in business. But also many miserable single women out there. I suspect there are more women wishing they had stopped to have a family than the press will cover.
Men will do what we are led to do by women and society at large. But it takes two to have a family. And there cannot be two if the bearer of children won't even consider it because society has re-programmed her and led her to believe her higher purpose is to pursue a career as a university professor teaching women's studies. And teaching women at large to hate men, is not a helpful step in increasing the resupply rate. It's not helpful to anyone for any reason.
Most women, if given the opportunity, would have more kids than they currently do. Most women want to be mothers,
I disagree. History has shown that when women are given the ability to control reproduction through birth control and abortion that birth rates go down. Today giving birth is safer, less painful and less risky in every way than it ever has been before, and the response is a dramatic drop in the number of births.
"History has shown that when women are given the ability to control reproduction through birth control and abortion that birth rates go down”
Now disentangle the de facto mandate that women now work at paying jobs, which occurred at roughly the same time.
I’d say the NYT commenter is right about the reasons. Not necessarily the feminist only ideas, although they are part of it, but also the Malthusians and the belief people are destroying the planet. I just wish the commenter good luck when they are elderly and the Governor forces them into a nursing home because there are no resources to take care of them.
"History has shown that when women are given the ability to control reproduction through birth control and abortion that birth rates go down”
Now disentangle the de facto mandate that women now work at paying jobs, which occurred at roughly the same time.
Again I disagree. A feminist (I'm not one) would argue that paying jobs was a source of freedom and independence for women that allowed them to escape the constraints (including pregnancy) and forced unpaid labor of the patriarchy.
Call this the Joe Biden-baby-boom hypothesis
That the people who are now babies will end up paying for everything?
"If you spend on family benefits and run the economy hot enough, maybe fertility rates will finally begin to float back up."
Or maybe not, because more money = fewer offspring:
"Birth rate in the United States in 2017, by household income"
My liberal brother in SF has no children and that is a good thing.
more money = fewer offspring
The Link between Fertility and Income
"In particular, women tend to give birth to no fewer than three children [around 5 or 6] in countries where GDP per capita is below $1,000 per year. In countries where GDP per capita is above $10,000 per year, women tend to give birth to no more than two children."
It's the opposite for income vs number of puppies.
One of the greatest joys in life is children; not more billable hours.
Do pronatalist policies really work? Which ones? And do they work in ways that would be considered productive for society? Which ones don't work? Do they do any damage?
And isn't the point more to encourage the childless to have a child or those with one child to have another? Where do the hordes of children come into it?
I give some support to the idea that women in patriarchal societies should have more freedom, but don't like the way we think supporting programs to change that makes us wonderful people. Such programs could have a positive effect, but tampering with other cultures has dangers, and we don't need self-congratulation and triumphalism and gloating over how much better our way is.
Many people have the post-modern idea that everything is about power, but they believe that taking power away from some people and giving it to other people (or using power in the name of that group) is somehow liberating and that it will stop everything from being about power. It's funny. I would have thought that that post-modern idea would lead to a skepticism about all ideologies and political positions, not just the ones we don't like.
If power is everything and Douthat is concerned about his group (broadly conceived) losing power, why are his concerns illegitimate? Plus, is "whiteness" considered in the five (or seven or nine or fifteen) group system really relevant anymore? So many people are of mixed race and so many more are likely to be that maybe what Ross is talking about isn't really "whiteness" in the traditional sense anymore.
It's bizarre people insist on pretending we can simply choose a "hot" economy like gunning a car's engine. And yet this is the underlying principle of technocrats both left and right.
What benefit is it to anyone to read this shit that the NYT and its commenters put out?
Is it true that women do not want to have many kids?
I guess most people want to have 1-3 kids, but I know a couple of families who have more than that. In each case, though, it was the mother who wanted to have more and the father would have been happy either way.
Children are labor intensive.
Women want to have fewer in order to fulfill societal "expectations" of full-time mothering.
In the past, children were labor intensive, sure, but there was distribution of the work to a greater degree--Grandparents helped out on occasion, kids were actually allowed to roam a bit, play with friends all day without mommy hovering over them every step etc etc. That was also enabled by the frequency of nearby children.
When children are isolated from others, when grandma and grandpa live 3,000 miles away, or are dead because you waited until you were 38 to have a kid, more kid-time falls on the parents and makes having more children difficult to imagine.
I don't know how/if government can promote hovering over your kids less, but a shift in attitudes regarding that would probably do more to encourage more births than anything.
"pronatalist liberals"
I have never met such a person. Where are they?
In the age of global warming, being pronatalist is sin.
Per Gahrie, we are running an unprecedented evolutionary experiment.
Women are the first females with complete control over their fertility. This raises a fundamental question: how many children do women prefer to have?
If, on average, that number is less than two, humanity is en route to self-extinction.
Given global fertility trends, it is possible we will die out in 300 or so years.
Fernandinande said...
more money = fewer offspring
In a rural economy children quickly become economic assets - cheap labor. In an information economy children are an economic liability - child care and college tuitions. The best move to improve fertility is reducing the cost of child care and college. But the left is never going to do this because their pay is the problem. There was a story this weekend about Ohio State hiring 50 new people for their diversity program on top of the 150 they already have.
This is why their goal is getting government to pay for it. Once you eliminate the cost concern there's no reason not to have 1,000 diversity officers. Life is easy when you can hire all your political allies and stick your enemies with the bill.
Sebastian said...
"pronatalist liberals"
I have never met such a person. Where are they?
Left wingers are so far behind they still think the Population Bomb is a concern.
Gahrie said...
Today giving birth is safer, less painful and less risky in every way than it ever has been before, and the response is a dramatic drop in the number of births.
This is a non sequitur.
From Vox,
"As of 2012, at least 11 rich countries had policies like that, according to the University of Antwerp's Minimum Income Protection Indicators (MIPI) database: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK."
It really works.
What Time Maguire said.
Douthat hopes that some sensible liberals want to have more children, but the reality is that it's just us religious people. We've moved across the country to be in a society more conducive to bigger families.
Having enjoyed the inflection in human history, where most have achieved modernity and the individualism of the separation of the economic, political, social and ideological/religious spheres, many in their aging years lament the change. From 1920 on, more and more of the world's population came to shift from a demography controlled by disease, injury, i.e., mortality, to one based on fertility controls of abortion, late marriage, birth control, etc. Prior to this only pockets, such as England had reached modernity, and often they would recede back into group dynamic controls.
Unfortunately, the social welfare state arose on the premise of an ever increasing number of children, surviving, to provide for the expanding elderly population. Not to mention, the economists have no ideal how an economy works without an ever expanding demand for new, and more, goods.
Other than to provide for the social welfare state, why do we need more kids? We've the modern trend now to have fewer children and invest more in their education (at least appearance-wise given the state of schooling), and to, colloquially, break their plate at a later age.
"Putting it simply, in an embedded peasant economy, when the unit of production and consumption is the family household, it is sensible to have as large a family as possible, to work the land and to protect against risk in sickness and old age. To increase reproduction is to increase production. Yet as Jack Caldwell and others have shown, when the individual becomes integrated into the market, when wealth flows down the generations, when the cost of education and leaving for an independent economic existence on an open market occurs, children become a burden rather than an asset.23 In other words, capitalistic relations combined with individualism knocks away the basis of high fertility, and if this is combined with a political and legal security so that one does not have to protect oneself with a layer of cousin, the sensible strategy is to have a few children and to educate them well.
"A low-pressure demography means that a society avoids the situation where extra resources are automatically absorbed by population expansion. As Malthus argued, the only force strong enough to stand against the biological desire to mate and have children, was the even stronger social desire to live comfortably and avoid poverty. This is exactly what seems to have happened in England from at least the late medieval period."
"Demography is a sensitive index to the presence of modernity. Where, as in most civilizations, the family is the basic unit of the economic, social, political and religious world, to expand the family is the ultimate goal – people want as many children as possible. But where a modern division between the spheres of economy, society, polity and religion has taken place, so that it is the individual alone who links the separated spheres, the individual’s interest are not served by large families."
--Chapter 8 of The Invention of the Modern World by Alan Macfarlane.
The education of women is what controls birthrates. Making it easier for more women to stay home with the kids is a good thing. A stich in time saves nine.
IN ---------------------------> OUT
climate change. global cooling
underpopulation crisis. overpopulation crisis
Blogger tim in vermont said...
"History has shown that when women are given the ability to control reproduction through birth control and abortion that birth rates go down”
Now disentangle the de facto mandate that women now work at paying jobs, which occurred at roughly the same time.
The "de facto mandate" is inflation and the cost of living that has almost ended the two parent family with one wage earner. Some of this is the consumerist culture when every woman (and they are the house buyers) wants a 2,000 square foot house with four bedrooms. When I was in college long ago, my classmate's parents (unless they were rich) had 700 square foot homes with two bedrooms. Few families had two cars and many had none.
Women were sold this feminist bullshit about careers but most of those careers are at minimum wage. Divorce and courts that favor women are a factor. Since the end of WWII, this country has had a huge cultural shift and most of it is not good for families and children.
Europe has another problem since the War but they are being replaced with Muslims.
Well fewer kids means less replacement which mean fewer worker support more of the dependent class.
Today giving birth is safer, less painful and less risky in every way than it ever has been before, and the response is a dramatic drop in the number of births.
This is a non sequitur.
Then it should be easy for you to prove the correlation is either inaccurate or coincidental.
Ultimately, what occurs on the planet controls the population of a particular inhabitant. Worrying about carrying capacity of Earth seems senseless to me, because sooner or later there is a BIG event that makes an adjustment in the numbers of everything. The Yellowstone caldera goes off. An asteroid of good size hits. A pathogen more like to the Black Death than to Covid-19.
Women’s willingness to reproduce is driven first by their hormones and later by the ease with which they can satisfy their acquisitive little soul’s need to acquire material goods. Trust me, when the free money runs out, vaginal access increases substantially.
"As of 2012, at least 11 rich countries had policies like that, according to the University of Antwerp's Minimum Income Protection Indicators (MIPI) database: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK."
It really works.
The article doesn't say that works, IOW it doesn't say that paying people increases fertility rate (# of births). All those countries have low fertility rates, mostly lower than the US.
Fertility rates:
Austria 1.47
Denmark 1.73
Finland 1.41
France 1.88
Germany 1.57
Ireland 1.75
Luxembourg 1.38
Netherlands 1.59
Norway 1.56
Sweden 1.76
UK 1.68
U.S. 1.73
Mexico 2.13
Peru 2.25
Niger 6.91
Two in latin america, one in west africa, would you want to live in niger (see the opening to hitman)
Not to mention, the economists have no ideal how an economy works without an ever expanding demand for new, and more, goods.
This.
You don't pay middle class women to have babies. You pay lower income woman to have babies. We did it once and how did that work out.
Poor women have always had to work outside the home, often as servants. And historically, wealthy families hired those servants to care for their children. The notion that it's natural for women to stay home raising kids is a relatively recent and class-limited phenomenon.
But maybe what you need is both — to give families more money and parental benefits and to give them a long economic expansion whose gains are widely shared.
I just this morning made a list of things my need. Giving families more money nor parental benefits nor long economic expansion were on the list.
Perhaps Douthat is just expressing himself poorly, and intends to say "maybe what the Federal Government should do...."
Is there a Constitutional Law scholar here who could point to where those powers are specifically granted by the People?
One bright spot in regards to demographics is that China’s birth rate appears to be in free fall. By mid century, we may have more people than they do. That’s what happens when a centrally planned economy with a traditional male bias for children brutally imposes a one child policy. Well, if your social security system involves sons, but not daughters, you end up with a severe shortage of future child bearers. One child means slightly less than half replacement level (1/2.1 or so), assuming a balanced sex ratio. But the for the last several decades, the sex mix of surviving Chinese babies has been heavily skewed towards boys, which means that the Chinese birth rate may be as bad as 1/3 replacement level. This is one of the reasons that centrally planned economies don’t do very well long term - because the government is always playing catch-up and over compensating.
Part of the problem is that the ChiComs realized that they could not reach self sufficiency as long as economic growth was consumed by population growth. This was recognized as a problem at least a half century ago, when I was taking economics classes. The quick and dirty solution that the Chinese picked was their One Child policy. This allowed them to reach economic self sufficiency and takeoff by greatly reducing population growth, allowing a larger portion of their GDP to be used for investment (which is only possible if ΔGDP > ΔP (population)). We discussed this a half century ago, and the Chinese, even back then seemed to realize that problem. But, because of their central planning, they grossly overreacted, then failed to act until it was probably too late, in response. In engineering, it would be an over responsive economic system, which refuses to reach equilibrium, but rather oscillates more and more wildly due to overreaction to feedback.
One of the problems with what China is facing is a very quickly aging population, where soon there will be too few workers to support all of their retired population.
Something douthat was not taught at exeter or harvard
“*Some* [p]oor women have always had to work outside the home, often as servants.” - FIFY
Maybe since agriculture has been mechanized. Probably the mechanization of agriculture has done more to decrease the demand for large families than anything. Then education to learn to shut off the baby making machine now they that were no longer needed.
I still think that given a choice, most women would prefer to have a couple three or four kids, had they the time and economic security to do it. I don’t think that the government can guarantee that security though.
Not by printing money, anyway. Unless that was the *only* thing they printed money for.
Printing money is like funding your life by borrowing on margin against your stocks. It seems like free money until one day it isn’t, and your life goes up in sudden flames like one of Hillary’s meeting schedules with foreign donors in one of those State Department flash bags.
"This is one of the reasons that centrally planned economies don’t do very well long term - because the government is always playing catch-up and over compensating. “
My brother used to run a factory, and he once told me that one of the things that would crater productivity on a given day was workers fiddling with knobs thinking they were ‘helping.'
"Women, given any kind of agency at all--which includes education and the ability to support oneself--don't want to have hordes of kids."
I have said it here before, but it bears repeating. When other people controlled women's lives, Evolution did not much care what women wanted, because they mostly didn't get it. But Evolution is now paying close attention to what women want. You've come a long way, Baby. Maybe you've reached the end of the line.
The notion that it's natural for women to stay home raising kids is a relatively recent and class-limited phenomenon.
Actually, that is true only for urban populations and that is a recent phenomenon. 95% of the population was farm families before 1900. My grandmother had 10 kids and my great grandmother had 12. What happened was that older daughters ended with child care for younger. "Hired girls" were also common and helped with kids and meals.
Feminists, masculinist: keep women appointed, available, and taxable.
Lose your Pro-Choice religion. Close Planned Parent/hood: selective-child, clinical cannibalism, Mengele clinics. Stand up to diversity dogmatists. End the advocacy and practice of the wicked solution.
Women and men have four choices: abstention, prevention, compassion, and responsibility.
A baby bust ends when you clear the Twilight Amendment, stand up to transhumanists, end diversity (i.e. color judgments including racism), following the science not the cargo cult, end policies of redistributive change, and stop advocacy for social justice anywhere in injustice everywhere.
Men and women are equal in rights and complementary in Nature/nature. Reconcile.
Gahrie said...
Today giving birth is safer, less painful and less risky in every way than it ever has been before, and the response is a dramatic drop in the number of births.
This is a non sequitur.
Then it should be easy for you to prove the correlation is either inaccurate or coincidental.
Easy. Let me oblige.
Your statement above can be broken out like this: Giving birth nowadays is less risky and painful than in the past. Therefore, due to this, we see a dramatic drop in the number of births.
In other words, your statement says that we see fewer births today because birthing is now easy/safe.
Those are not the reasons why we see fewer births today. Some reasons for lower birth rate may be legal (abortion is not a crime nowadays), social (peer pressure; more women with careers), change of religious attitudes, etc. But not because birthing is easier/safer... if anything, being easier/safer would encourage more births.
Therefore, a correct statement of the above woud be:
Today giving birth is safer, less painful and less risky in every way than it ever has been before, despite the observed dramatic drop in the number of births.
Monotheistic cultures, really?
Religions: morality, its relativistic sibling "ethics", its politically congruent cousin "law", are philosophical treatises. Historically, societies with mortal gods and goddesses are more transgressive, where ostensibly "secular" religions are enforced through threats of coercion (e.g. take a knee, beg), cancellation (e.g. abortion chambers), and denial of humanity (e.g. Jew privilege, baby/fetus).
Dependency ratios are all that matters in the end. I don't care if MMT is a valid thing, you still have to work and produce to support both your immediate family all the people on the government teat who are paid directly by your tax burden. That has been the change in the last 80 years- social welfare programs have more and more beneficiaries while taking the product from fewer and fewer productive workers. Something has to give, and what gives in the world of birth control is fewer and fewer children.
If you want increased fertility, you will have to greatly reduce the burden of social welfare programs regardless of how they are funded. In the end, the only thing redistributed is actual goods and services, not cash.
Today giving birth is safer, less painful and less risky in every way than it ever has been before, and the response is a dramatic drop in the number of births.
That's possible. Mother and baby are at less risk on a forward-looking basis. With the normalization of elective abortion, socially liberal practices (e.g. friends with "benefits"), dysfunctional orientations and behaviors (e.g. transgenderism, sodomy), and exotic methods of impregnation, the value of human life has diminished. Women are educated to remain appointed, available, and taxable until a later age and reduced viability, which has been good for special and peculiar interests in State, business, Planned Parent/hood, and Mengele clinics.
In the end, the only thing redistributed is actual goods and services, not cash.
Progressive prices (i.e. capital destruction) and availability, and the demand to inflate income and public smoothing functions (e.g. welfare) to compensate.
But Evolution is now paying close attention to what women want. You've come a long way, Baby. Maybe you've reached the end of the line.
The 0.1% are happy: keep women appointed, available, and taxable. Normalize voluntary planned population schemes (e.g. selective-child). Planned Parent/hood (e.g. clinical cannibalism, "burden" relief). Immigration reform. Diversity (e.g. racism) breeds adversity. Political congruence and inclusive exclusion. Progressive prices and availability (e.g. Obamacares). Wars without borders. Transnational terrorism. Social justice. An ostensibly "secular" religion: Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic and a State-established Progressive Cult/corporation/clinic/chamber/racket.
Here is a visual representation of how the US (and all the 1st world countries) have traded supporting children for old people. The percentages are just the ratios of 20 and under and 65 and over (those dependent) to those 20-64 (the work force). Even worse, not everyone 20-64 is part of the work force- a great number of them are also dependents- this worsens with time, too.
"And if there is anything the planet doesn't need, it's more humans than existing sociopolitical forces are already grinding out."
Sorry, ya'll, I cannot resist replying:
When my husband and I were busy making more useless humans, it wasn't Sociopolitical Forces grinding it out.
But not because birthing is easier/safer... if anything, being easier/safer would encourage more births.
You would think so, wouldn't you.
Which was precisely my point. They didn't respond that way, they responded exactly the opposite way.
"Today giving birth is safer, less painful and less risky in every way than it ever has been before, and the response is a dramatic drop in the number of births."
But it doesn't FEEL safer, does it? It feels like each pregnancy is an all-or-nothing roll of the cosmic dice.
It's also an enormous financial commitment. I'm still haunted by the fact that we never had a third child, per my husband's wishes. But I am forced to admit that I don't see how we could have afforded to do so without completely up-ending our lives, changing careers and moving to a less-costly area. As it is, we are approaching retirement with recently-fully-launched kids and only now is there room in the budget for savings beyond retirement accounts.
I don't have children. My father asked me about 10 years ago who was going to support me in my old age if I didn't have children. He was teasing me gently, so I shot back, "I don't know, who is going to support you?" I did get his point, and it is the world that has been lost, and it is a demographic trap that is difficult to get out of once it sets in. If you want to know where the US is going to be a decade from now, like Douthat's essay is trying to discern, all you need to do is look at the countries that were where we are today but 10-20 years ago. This suggests the fertility rate of the US is going to fall steeply from here, not rise at all.
"our Posterity" excluded with assertion of the Twilight Amendment (i.e. penambras and emanations, alt-faith).
Gahrie said...
But not because birthing is easier/safer... if anything, being easier/safer would encourage more births.
You would think so, wouldn't you.
Which was precisely my point. They didn't respond that way, they responded exactly the opposite way.
And my point is that they didn't respond that way because birthing is now easier/safer... they, in the whole, responded that way because of the other things I listed, such as careers, abortion on demand, peer pressure, and probably other things I'm not accounting for.
The trend that you are considering consist of many sub-trends: birthing is safter, abortion is consequence-free, birthing is easier, some women value careers over children than in the past, birthing in more pain-free, some people look down their noses at large families today, etc. The sum of all of these sub-trends adds up to the overall trend. With only this general level of information, all we can say is that the net impact is a lower birth rate today than in the past. The causes in my list obviously surpass the easier/safer trend in overall importance to the considerations for having/not having children today. If birthing was just as hard/dangerous/painful today as it was in the 1800's, I'm pretty sure that the birthrate today would be even lower than it is today. The time correlation of today's lower birth rate with easier/safer/painless births is not causation of that lower birth rate.
What about the difficulty in finding a stable, decent man to raise children with in the first place? If I had reproduced with my younger choices in men, pretty sure I'd be a bitter divorcee by now. Yeah the world would have had another unit - but at the cost of my stability and sanity? No thanks.
Every time I thought I'd found a 'good stable one' some sort of shit would raise its ugly head: substance abuse, inability to suck up the normal stress that comes with a job. Finding men with a plethora of issues seems to be like hitting the side of a barn: way too easy. By the time I'd honed my ability to choose men - nearly menopausal. And I grew up with a good role model - probably too good.
What we need to do is pursue market reform to mitigate progressive prices (e.g. Obamacares). We need to separate State and Progressive Cult (i.e. Pro-Choice religion). We need to respect women's four choices. We need to stem social liberalism. We need to remove secular incentives for single-mother households. Stand up to feminism and masculinism. Close Planned Parent/hood.
If birthing was just as hard/dangerous/painful today as it was in the 1800's, I'm pretty sure that the birthrate today would be even lower than it is today.
Then why has it remained higher in societies in which child birth is still painful and dangerous? In fact I propose (admittedly without evidence) that there is a positive correlation between the ease of childbirth (and child rearing) and the birth rate. The more difficult child birth is, the more often it happens.
The time correlation of today's lower birth rate with easier/safer/painless births is not causation of that lower birth rate.
Interesting opinion, but I don't see how it is any more valid than mine, and without any evidence other than "I think", I am not persuaded.
" If I had reproduced with my younger choices in men, pretty sure I'd be a bitter divorcee by now."
You'd probably also have the kids, possibly the house and quite likely, a chunk of his income. Marrying is risky for men, too.
Blogger Yancey Ward said...
I don't have children. My father asked me about 10 years ago who was going to support me in my old age if I didn't have children.
I have five and am still supporting a couple of them, at least partially. At age 83. Keeps me young.
"From the comments at the NYT: "It should tell Mr. Douthat something that most of the top comments are from women. Guess what. Women, given any kind of agency at all--which includes education and the ability to support oneself--don't want to have hordes of kids."
Don't confuse anecdotal data with reality, especially when referring to the top commentators from a New York Times opinion article.
Gahrie said...
If birthing was just as hard/dangerous/painful today as it was in the 1800's, I'm pretty sure that the birthrate today would be even lower than it is today.
Then why has it remained higher in societies in which child birth is still painful and dangerous? In fact I propose (admittedly without evidence) that there is a positive correlation between the ease of childbirth (and child rearing) and the birth rate. The more difficult child birth is, the more often it happens.
It has happened in those societies (i.e., mainly 3rd world societies, or perhaps in strictly religious societies) exactly because those are societies that have not changed much from the past. They still prohibit abortion. Women don't have executive careers. Motherhood is much admired (have a quiver-full!). Big families are generally still accepted and seen as necessary (for family labor, taking care of the elderly, etc.) there. The same reasons why women in advanced societies are having fewer children are the same reasons why women in those 3rd world societies, who haven't changed at all in the last 100 years, still act like they did 100 years ago!
The time correlation of today's lower birth rate with easier/safer/painless births is not causation of that lower birth rate.
Interesting opinion, but I don't see how it is any more valid than mine, and without any evidence other than "I think", I am not persuaded.
Well, as an opinion (because I'm not a sociologist with emphasis in this area), you're correct - it's not more valid than yours, nor is yours more valid than mine. But mind you, we are not both correct, one is right, and the other is wrong - there is an underlying truth to these assertions. Someone with expertise would have to be the judge.
However, I hold my opinion based on (but not solely on) some common sense observations about human behavior. Some ideas I've never heard expressed on this subject are:
"I'd like to have another child, but there's just no challenge in it, seeing how easy, safe and pain-free it is nowadays. I guess I'll just keep my single child and nanny, and be forced to retain my position as CFO for MegaBucks Industries"
- or for that matter -
"Living here in Outer Zambonia is really difficult, with mouths to feed and all, but I want to keep on having children because I like to gamble with my health, and of course, no pain, no gain, right?"
So, Gahrie posits that 1st world birth rate is going down because women are reacting against the facts that today, there is less difficulty, less health risk and less pain in childbirth.
I'm positing that 1st world birth rate is going down due to factors like legalized abortion, changing religious views, career opportunities and general affluence in those societies. I further posit that improved birthing conditions are a factor working against the downward trend, but aren't in themselves enough to completely counter that trend.
So, two opinions. Who is correct? I guess we'll have to leave it to someone with 'a higher pay-grade' on this subject.
Great news! The Progs are not reproducing!
Great news! The Progs are not reproducing!
They reproduce through indoctrination.
I trust nothing from the NYT.
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