I have recommended the demographer Lyman Stone many times, and the interview Razib Khan did with him this fall may be the best yet. We note that developed countries have progressively fewer children and conclude that rising income depresses fertility. But it is not so. That is only a mild correlation when isolated from other factors. The big drivers are education, urbanisation, and the long-term projected cost of children. He notes, for example, that South Korean culture expects that children will live with their parents until they can have a home of their own, and at the end of their twenties if they have not achieved that, the parents buy them a home. Knowing that this is the situation thirty years earlier raises the possible cost of each child, and reduces the desire to have too many. Even if they are married, they tend not to have children. Stone notes wryly "there is no birth control as good as having your parents down the hall."
South Korea is now down to 0.6 children per woman, an insanely low and self-destructive norm. Since WWII they have become increasingly urbanised and educated, and the expectation for a person to "succeed" in some high-status job is now so enormous that people stay in school in fields they do not even like and give up all else in order to have this.
He notes that Chinese elites have a long tradition of few children per woman, and they have long been educated, urbanised, and expected to pay for expensive education/houses/dowries. The phenomenon was disguised by serial polygamy, so that elite men had many children, while the women had few.
Fascinating discussion start to finish.
Uncomfortable update. There is a full description of the forced attempts at heightened fertility in Romania under Ceausescu, and the horrible results of that. It includes some background I didn't know about how many of the children got put in orphanages. I'm not sharing this information with my middle sons. They deserve to forget as much as possible.
5 comments:
The birth dearth is a very, very big deal, probably the biggest problem now facing humanity. A total fertility rate of only 0.6 means the South Korean population is reduced by more than 70% each generation. Ukraine has the same low birth rate, and much of Europe has a TFR that is only about 60% of replacement. There are abandoned village all over Europe. In eastern Germany, there is a villiage inhabited entirely by wild feral animals, including wolves. All of this was point out by Mark Steyn over a decade ago.
The world population will likely peak at around 8.5 billion sometime in the next decade, and will thereafter decline slowly (assuming no nuclear war).
The main problem with declining population is that it is also an aging population that spends down its savings. There is a necessary decline in GDP, largely because the working population is falling. There is a serious issue of whether infrastructure, manufacturing and various institutions can be maintained. Judging from Europe's present predicament, large parts of the economy will simply be abandoned.
Loss of labor is being used as an excuse for mass immigration. Britain had almost 1 million new immigrants last year, and nearly as many the year before. The immigrants bring their culture with them, so Britain, like Germany, France, Sweden, the US (the whole West), is seeing large scale population replacement and cultural change. The nearest historical example is the Germanic occupation of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th Centuries.
The most likely cultural, economic, and political future for the US is some mix of Mexico and Brazil. This will happen a lot faster than you think. Just look at Los Angeles. It went from white control to black control to Mexican control in a single generation.
Enjoy you new country, and obey you new masters.
I find it fascinating that men seem to be much more interested in this topic than women, to judge from the various pundits who opine on the issue.
As a woman, let me insert some additional factors into the discussion. Men may think they have input into the decision to have a child, but in practice, women have the ultimate power to decline to conceive. The greatest loss is not financial. The greatest loss is the opportunity cost to the young woman. As a parent, imagine your daughter comes home one day from high school, and announces her desire to marry her high school sweetheart, a very fine young man. Are you overjoyed? Probably not.
After all, half of marriages end in divorce. At the end of the marriage, there's a non-zero chance your daughter would be a single mother raising children, without child support, her only means of support her earnings as a high school graduate.
So, it isn't a simple economic decision. IF governments care about the birth rate, then there must be programs that make it easier for women to put off education and employment for childbearing.
Ideas: tuition guarantees for young mothers. Admission guarantees to state flagships for young mothers.
No federal contracts for companies that only hire new college graduates.
Penalties for companies with antisocial work hours. (as in, "hmm, all your employees in the career track are men, and they work 100 hours a week?" Note that Wall Street is notorious for treating new hires that way. There have been deaths.)
I could go on. I can predict that there will be a furore about my proposals, but this is a serious problem. It needs serious solutions. At present the women selecting themselves out of the gene pool are our smartest, hardest working, and most ambitious young women. This isn't a good thing.
My oldest child is in her late 20s. I can think of 3 babies born to her friends and acquaintances. Very few marriages yet. This is serious.
I'll be the skunk at the garden party. What Cranberry points out (in addition to the fact that motherhood and homemaking are considered declassee) is that no fault divorce has been a disaster for women, like many of the great advances originally proposed by feminists.
Not necessarily. After all, there have been many husbands who have left wives without divorcing them. Ireland, before instituting divorce in 1995, had many sad family situations, including many "second" families. Being married to a deadbeat (of either gender) is something to be avoided, as well.
I would look rather at the extension of human lifespan, and the explosion in the number of careers that do not require hard manual labor. There is a quantifiable cost to devoting time to bear and raise children. The immediate lost wages can be calculated, but the damage to a career also bears a cost. The human childbearing cycle does not align well--or aligns too well--with the cycle of education and career advancement in this country.
A high school classmate of mine married a much older man upon graduation. When he retired, he took over minding the children, she went to college, and is now a successful teacher. We live a very long time. It makes little sense to require a set sequence of events on a large scale, when that very sequence discourages the formation of the next generation.
I am sorry that my PC crashed and the info has not migrtated to the iMac - that plus mailing presents to Norway and writing this year's magnificent Christmas Letter (and Operation Christmas Child and DIL's with serious medical issues) but everyone needs to hold their brilliance until I can get the Fertility Crisis series at least started!
You guys are so impatient...
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