Posted on 08/21/2007 11:15:21 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Regular readers will recall that we are on the verge of a population problem. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe, and in nearly every industrialized country are already below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Despite the appearance of a world bursting at the seams with an ever-greater number of people, the current growth rate is slowing and the world's population is likely to peak about nine billion and then begin contracting - precipitously - by 2080. Regular readers also will recall that there are convincing, if not certain, reasons to suspect that population contraction could be bad for civilization. So what is to be done? We've never had a population contraction in modern times, but it has happened before. The Greek historian Polybius wrote, circa 140 B.C., about his own civilization's fertility decline. The same fate eventually befell the Roman Empire, where birthrates became so low that Caesar Augustus instituted a "bachelor tax" to punish men who did not marry and produce children.
Such measures would be untenable today, but while population contraction won't become a global reality for 70 more years, the decline in fertility is already worrying some governments. In Poland, which has a deathly fertility rate of 1.26, the prime minister recently proposed tax exemptions for mothers. In Russia (fertility rate: 1.39), the government offered a bonus of $9,200 for women who had a second child and has begun running youth camps where young men and women are encouraged to procreate right then and there. Portugal (fertility rate: 1.48) is trying to change its pension system so workers with fewer than two children will pay more into it through taxes.
Elsewhere, the support for natalism has been more rhetorical. Before being elected prime minister in Turkey (fertility rate: 1.89), Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that contraception was "treason to the state" and that Turks should "have babies, Allah wants it."
Yet experience shows that it is easier to depress fertility - as the governments of China and Mexico have - than it is to goose it. For instance, Soviet Russia tried desperately to get women to have children as it faced collapse in the 1980s, going so far as to award a "Motherhood Medal." It didn't help. Sweden has also been struggling with dangerously low fertility. Through a series of incentives, officials managed to move the country's rate up to replacement level for a moment in the 1980s, only to see it plummet again in the 1990s. It stands today at 1.66.
Fortunately for us, the United States is in a better position than these other countries - for now. Buoyed in part by immigration, our fertility rate sits just below replacement (2.09). And the good news is that we have gotten rich before we will get old. (One of the demographic quirks about population contraction is that as the fertility rate drops, the average age increases; to put matters crudely, old people are more costly than young people.)
But this benign situation is not likely to last. More likely is that at some point in the coming years, pro-natalism will become a significant feature of U.S. politics, too.
So what will pro-natalist politics look like? The single most important factor in predicting fertility is what demographers unromantically refer to as "desired fertility" - the number of children a couple would like to have. This figure, however, is more restrictive than predictive. If the desired fertility rate is 2.0, for instance, the actual fertility rate may wind up lower, but it almost certainly won't be higher.
For instance, studies show that among Europeans, actual fertility lags noticeably behind desired fertility. German and Italian women born in 1960, for instance, had desired fertility rates of 2.0 and 2.1 respectively, but a real rate of only 1.65. Across the continent, if women had reproduced at the levels they wished for, Europe would not be facing a baby bust. There has been a similar gap between desired and actual fertility in the United States. U.S. women born in 1960, for instance, desired 2.3 children but produced only 1.9.
Desired fertility is particularly difficult to manipulate, as the failure of the Motherhood Medal demonstrates. But fortunately, in the United States that aspect isn't a big part of the problem: Desired fertility numbers are actually rising, with 42 percent of Gen-Xers - compared with only 29 percent of baby boomers - saying three or more children is the ideal size for a family.
A pro-natalist politics, then, seeks not to persuade people to have children, but rather tries to make having children more economically feasible. And it can start, as most everything in government does, with taxes.
In 1950, the Social Security tax rate was 1.5 percent for employees, with all wages above $3,000 tax-free. This meant a worker paid a maximum of $144 ($1,100 in today's dollars) in annual Social Security tax. By 2003, the maximum Social Security tax was $11,136 in constant dollars - a 1,000 percent increase. To put it more starkly, the median tax rate of a family with one earner in 1955 was 17.3 percent. By 1998, that median rate had jumped to 37.6 percent.
Since everyone is eligible for Social Security, these taxes are a transfer of wealth from those who create the next generation of human capital to those without children. Pro-natalist politicians will find ways to change this system, perhaps by cutting Social Security taxes for families with more than two children.
College is another problem. The unending spiral of college tuition both increases the costs for prospective parents and saddles with debt many young couples who might be contemplating starting a family. But just as important, the expanding timeline of college and the increasing necessity of graduate degrees continue to push back the age of entry to the workforce - and hence the financial ability to start a family. The problem is that nature has its own fertility boundaries. The entire college system needs to be changed to make it both more affordable and flexible to young couples who want to start families.
Pro-natalism shouldn't be antithetical to either Democrats or Republicans. Certainly, both parties would face some internal resistance - Republicans from big-business types who care only about sucking the most out of employees, Democrats from those who see traditional families as patriarchal structures that should be destabilized. But at this moment, either party could claim pro-natalism as its own.
Sooner or later, one of them will. The 2008 election may be about Iraq and George W. Bush and the housing market. But the future of U.S. politics is going to be which party helps people have babies. And that's up for grabs.
Thanks to immigration, legal and illegal, the US has one of highest annual population growth rates in the developed world, i.e., .89% a year. Since 1970 we have added 100 million people; since 1990, 53 million, and since 2000, 21 million. In the next 23 years [2030] our population will increase 62 million, the equivalent of the current population of the UK, and by 2050 our population will be 420 million or 118 million more people than we have now.
It is debatable as to whether this is good news or not given the increased requirments of infrastructure, water, energy, roads, etc. Moreover, the demographics of the country will change dramatically.
In 1965, the United States was overwhelmingly composed of whites of European descent (89% in 1965), with the only minority group of significant size being blacks (10%). By 2050, non-Hispanic whites will be 50% of the population and falling fast. Today, half of the children ages 0-5 are minorities. This massive demographic change in less than 100 years is the result of legal immigration policies and porous borders. What is of particular concern is that Hispanics and blacks have the highest high school dropout rates by far. The social pathology of what is happening is disturbing. We are creating a permanent underclass and the gap between rich and poor is growing as wages are depressed at the lower end of the wage scale by this influx of cheap, exploitable labor.
Hispanics were 1% of the population in 1950. By 2000 they were 12.6%. Today they are over 15% and by 2050 they will be 24.4% of the population. The question is can we assimilate such numbers or will we become Balkanized along linguistic and cultural lines?
Gentlemen, start your engines.
Ladies, you know what to do.
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Heh. I like ya’ Mrs. Don-o. If I were an unmarried papist and you were available . . .
Falling societies have always had fertility problems. Roman emperors tried to encourage Roman fertility (unsuccessfully). I think it comes from a lack of allegience to anything outside of the self. Building a family is not obviously the right move for an epicurian, and by the time a person realizes what they’ve given up, it’s too late for them, and they are too old and too much of a fuddy duddy for the hedonistic or epicurian youth to take them seriously if they say they should have had a family. Besides, why should an old epicurian who made a mistake waste the little time left to him trying to save others from making the same lonely mistake he made?
but they’re already not paying taxes, they’d get no new benefits.
Illegitimate children not eligible. Tax breaks available to married couples only.
Uh, if you, uh, keep it under wraps...
It’ll catch up with your Social Secuirty about 8 years from now.
You've got that right.
The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate – even more than unbounded levels of immigration – will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades.
By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans will be Hispanic by midcentury, twice the current ratio.
It's the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country – over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly 1 ½ times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for unmarried white women, 22 for unmarried Asian women, and 66 for unmarried black women.
Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent for whites and 15 percent for Asians. Only the percentage for blacks – 68 percent – is higher. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.
The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for teens from Mexico, part of the fastest-growing immigrant population in the U.S., greatly outstrips every other group.
In the 1970s when I was in high school, it was the population time bomb that was going to get us all. Isn't this population 'problem' a good thing?
Testosterone levels are down something like 20% from a generation ago.
Sperm counts are down worse than that.
Even if we got our priorities straight, it might not matter anyays....
You know the p.c. police will never allow breaks for married only.
Sure, married get better breaks - for now. But I don’t think we can even approximately guess the number of illegitimates we have. “There’s a sucker born every minute” may be closer to the truth than we want to know.
Folks, I have been wondering about this for a long, long time; and I ask for your comments and ideas because of my ignorance.
Right now, as the argument goes, there are not enough births to pay for what appears to be some (many?) of the socialistic aspects of our society. What seems to be our “savior” is immigration from other countries (forget illegals). If our population went down, wouldn’t there be some kind of forced adjustment? It sounds to me this hysteria is similar to global warming type thinking, and I don’t say this out of criticism to those who are worried.
Any comments would be extremely welcomed.
Thank you.
And here I thought wrapping it was part of the problem....
The article makes the point that “actual” childbearing falling short of “desired” childbearing is a widespread phenomenon. There are lots of couples that would have welcomed #3 but only had two, etc.
So the key is to make it more possible for married couples (I emphasize marriage)to have the children they want. Marrriage being a public signal that their commitment is serious and not just notional.
The major cause of couples having tiny families is that they don’t start childbearing until the wife is already in her 30’s and well past her peak fertility.
So I think one of the most important things would be to make it more feasible for recent college-grad couples to marry. That means dealing with college debts and downpayments.
Yep.
But the question was how to encourage a rising childbirth rate. My answer would do it. If we embrace political correctness then we deserve to fade away.
Force the PC police out of power and encourage families. If not, last one out please turn out the lights.
Pollicy, schmallicy...Lawsy, there must be some way to keep the world safe from my typos... 8^/
But phallusy would be better than fallacy ;o)
I have heard that if your parents never had any kids, in all probability, you won’t either. :-)
Actually, welfare recipients and young immigrants have comparatively low voting rates. Married people and older people have far higher voting rates.
I don't know about "pollicy", but four-wheel-driving on a bumpy dirt road sure can!
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