Posted on 05/23/2024 8:44:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
As birth rates plunge, many politicians want to pour money into policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has vowed to dish out bonuses if he returns to the White House. In France, where the state already spends 3.5-4% of gdp on family policies each year, Emmanuel Macron wants to “demographically rearm” his country. South Korea is contemplating handouts worth a staggering $70,000 for each baby. Yet all these attempts are likely to fail, because they are built on a misapprehension.
Governments’ concern is understandable. Fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere and the rich world faces a severe shortage of babies. At prevailing birth rates, the average woman in a high-income country today will have just 1.6 children over her lifetime. Every rich country except Israel has a fertility rate beneath the replacement level of 2.1, at which a population is stable without immigration. The decline over the past decade has been faster than demographers expected.
Doomsayers such as Elon Musk warn that these shifts threaten civilisation itself. That is ridiculous, but they will bring profound social and economic changes. A fertility rate of 1.6 means that, without immigration, each generation will be a quarter smaller than the one before it. In 2000 rich countries had 26 over-65-year-olds for every 100 people aged 25-64. By 2050 that is likely to have doubled. The worst-affected places will see even more dramatic change. In South Korea, where the fertility rate is 0.7, the population is projected to fall by 60% by the end of the century.
The decision to have children is a personal one and should stay that way. But governments need to pay heed to rapid demographic shifts. Ageing and shrinking societies will probably lose dynamism and military might. They will certainly face a budgetary nightmare, as taxpayers struggle to finance the pensions and health care of legions of oldies.
Many pro-natalist policies come with effects that are valuable in themselves. Handouts for poor parents reduce child poverty, for instance, and mothers who can afford child care are more likely to work. However, governments are wrong to think it is within their power to boost fertility rates. For one thing, such policies are founded on a false diagnosis of what has so far caused demographic decline. For another, they could cost more than the problems they are designed to solve.
One common assumption is that falling fertility rates stem from professional women putting off having children. The notion that they run out of time to have as many babies as they wish before their childbearing years draw to a close explains why policies tend to focus on offering tax breaks and subsidised child care. That way, it is argued, women do not have to choose between their family and their career.
That is not the main story. University-educated women are indeed having children later in life, but only a little. In America their average age at the birth of their first child has risen from 28 in 2000 to 30 now. These women are having roughly the same number of children as their peers did a generation ago. This is a little below what they say is their ideal family size, but the gap is no different from what it used to be.
Instead, the bulk of the decline in the fertility rate in rich countries is among younger, poorer women who are delaying when they start to have children, and who therefore have fewer overall. More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate since 1990 is caused by a collapse in births among women under 19. That is partly because more of them are going to college. But even those who leave education after high school are having children later. In 1994 the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree was 20. Today, about two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s are yet to have their first child.
Some politicians may seize on this to aim baby-boosting policies at very young women. They may be tempted, too, by evidence that poorer women respond more to financial incentives. But focusing on young and poor women as a group would be bad for them and for society. Teenage pregnancies are linked to poverty and ill health for both mother and child. Targeted incentives would roll back decades of efforts to curb unwanted teenage pregnancy and encourage women into study and work. Those efforts, along with programmes to enhance gender equality, rank among the greatest public-policy triumphs of the postwar era.
Some illiberal governments, such as those of Hungary and Russia, may choose to ignore this progress. Yet they face a practical problem, because government incentives do not seem to bring lots of extra babies even as spending mounts. Sweden offers an extraordinarily generous child-care programme, but its total fertility rate is still only 1.7. Vast amounts of money are needed to encourage each extra baby. And handouts tend to go to all babies, including those who would have been born anyway. As a result, schemes in Poland and France cost $1m-2m per extra birth. Only a tiny number of citizens are productive enough to generate fiscal benefits to offset that kind of money. Due to low social mobility only 8% of American children born to parents without bachelor’s degrees end up getting such a degree themselves.
Women who have been educated under feminist ideals are not going to voluntarily give them up. This problem is not solvable - expect by AI doing all the work for a few Eloi at the top.
We need stable middle class jobs for MEN and we need to enable husbands to have pride in work and be good providers. This thing of the majority of women expected to forge careers in their childbearing years is not working. Men need a bone-deep, fundamental purpose in life so that women can live out their fundamental purpose.
Trump was 100% right to increase onshoring, levy tariffs on imports, create empowerment zones, encourage our own manufacturing, limit immigration and lower taxes. It’s why the globalist control freaks hate him.
Bring him back.
Think of all the vast farmlands that China has been buying up. We could once again have thriving cotton and linen textile industries and long-lasting cotton “normcore” garments (plain shirts, jackets, denims, shorts, chinos, khakis, uniforms), because the field work and refining of the fibers is now done very efficiently by machines.
If blacks get triggered by cottonfields as they drive by in their Crown Victorias, too bad—many a poor redneck picked cotton and was glad to put food on the table by it. You still see some smallholder cotton fields in the south —“Carolina snow.”
“That’s why so many men are angry.”
Then maybe they should stop abusing and cheating.
No, answer is simple. Re-establish the draft to include women. Only Pregnant, married women will not be called on to serve. Watch as women 18 to 24 instantly get married and get pregnant to escape service. It will spark a needed baby boom.
Yes,
It will be a struggle and it will take time.
But that’s the only “true fix.”
The mass immigration is a short term solution that ultimately destroys the culture of the host/receiving nation and creates all new problems.
It undermines the value system long term. Look at Dearborn Michigan as an example.
Brining in massive amounts of South Americans, Chinese, Indians, Africans... This brings it’s own problems but it does in the short term stuff the demographic hole.
They were both good at colonization. But ultimately, the Romans were superior builders and they were more civilized.
"Then maybe" nothing.
1. Both sides abuse and cheat. But only men are punished. Women are rewarded for their misbehavior.
2. Most cases of women alleging "abuse" by men are for "emotional abuse." This is not abuse at all. It simply means the woman is unhappy in the marriage. Much like Eve was unhappy in the Garden.
So men who are faithful husbands are punished even when they didn't do anything wrong, merely because the woman is looking for an excuse to exit the marriage.
I was told by men in the military that there was a sudden surge of pregnancies among service women shortly before the Iraq War.
How much did family necessities (food, shelter, energy) cost in 1979 vs. today? Weekly average full-time earnings (hourly & salaried) have only gone from $335./week in 1979 to $365./week now. And that is using the govt. manipulated CPI, it is actually worse than that. Since going off the gold standard government monetary malfeasance has mandated “2-income families” thereby dropping the birth rate. I don’t see a way to recover at this point...hope I am wrong.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.