Britain needs a middle-class baby boom

A growing population is a blessing so long as everyone joins in, argues Melanie McDonagh

By Melanie McDonagh

When I was born, I was, though I didn't know it at the time, part of the great Sixties baby boom. It was quite inescapable in Ireland. I was the sole only child in my class – everyone I knew came from families of around five. A proper big family had 12 children, which was the case with one friend of mine. When her grandmother was asked how many grandchildren there were now, she'd answer: "Twelve, at least last time I counted." It meant that, whenever you went to play in someone's house, you'd always find yourself being shushed up because you might wake the baby.
And you know what? It was good fun being around big families, even though those children were reared by mothers for whom family life was synonymous with hard labour. By definition, a society that has lots of children is fundamentally optimistic.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/6103250/Britain-needs-a-middle-class-baby-boom.html

Europe's demographic and cultural time bomb

Carolyn Moynihan

In Brussels, the top seven boys names recently were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza. Mohamed is also the most popular name in Holland’s four biggest cities. Is anyone surprised?

Perhaps not, but a recent London Telegraph article suggests, with a certain note of alarm, that a “Muslim Europe” is emerging while policy-makers refuse to discuss the potential problems of this “demographic time bomb”. It reminds one a bit of Inspector Clouseau avowing, “It is not my Behm.”

http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/europes_demographic_and_cultural_time_bomb/

Demographic Bomb

Part two of Demographic Winter, Demographic Bomb came out June 29th. This movie features a video clip of Dr. J! Check it out here!

The World's New Numbers - A Different View On the World's Changing Demographics

Josh Friedeman, the Millennial Perspective

I may have gotten something very wrong. If not, then I am about to get it wrong.

In the last week I have seen two enormously contradictory reports on the world's changing demographics. The first report - an attention-grabbing video comparing the dropping birthrates of the Western world with the exceedingly high birthrates of the Muslims - can be found in an earlier blog. Now I am going to share with you the second, more in-depth, and (hopefully) more accurate report.

Martin Walker of The Wilson Quarterly writes this in an interesting article entitled The World's New Numbers:

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=516492

Demographics & Depression

by David P. Goldman

Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John Maynard Keynes, President Bush and President Obama each offered a fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve maintained confidence in the financial system, increased the money supply, and lowered interest rates. The major industrial nations worked together, rather than at cross purposes as they had in the early 1930s.

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6564

Encouraging Larger Families

Our Ruth Youth video contest has been completed, and the winners will be announced soon. Check out the Ruth Institute site to see the videos. Congratulations to the winners of the cash prizes!

Good news, Bad News on the black family

According to the NYT, The good news is that more black children are living with two parents.

The number of black children being raised by two parents appears to be edging higher than at any time in a generation, at nearly 40 percent, according to newly released census data....
According to the bureau’s estimates, the number of black children living with two parents was 59 percent in 1970, falling to 42 percent in 1980, 38 percent in 1990 and 35 percent in 2004. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, it was 40 percent.

The bad news is that it may be just a statistical artifact of having changed the definitions:

The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents....
“The unmarried parent was invisible,” Professor Cherlin said. Given a new category, “living with both parents, not married to each other,” he added, “I think the news is that the Census Bureau estimates that about 3 percent of American children are living with two unmarried parents. Because of the increases in living-together relationships, this is probably a higher figure than a generation ago.”

Now, if we just increase the actual marriage rate, the kids would really benefit.

Autism and Advanced Parental Age

Regular readers of this blog know that I have an interest in everything relating to fertility, and to delayed child-bearing. Here is more evidence that advanced paternal age may be a factor in a child's risk of autism. From the abstract:

After adjustment for the other parent's age, birth order, maternal education, and other covariates, both maternal and paternal age were independently associated with autism (adjusted odds ratio for maternal age 35 vs. 25–29 years = 1.3, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 1.6; adjusted odds ratio for paternal age 40 years vs. 25–29 years = 1.4, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 1.8). Firstborn offspring of 2 older parents were 3 times more likely to develop autism than were third- or later-born offspring of mothers aged 20–34 years and fathers aged <40 years (odds ratio = 3.1, 95% confidence interval: 2.0, 4.7). The increase in autism risk with both maternal and paternal age has potential implications for public health planning and investigations of autism etiology.

This differs from other studies I have posted, in that the mothers' age appears to be a risk factor, as well as the fathers' age.
We have been trying to fool Mother Nature by postponing fertility indefinitely. Women have learned to their sorrow that this is not always possible: advanced maternal age increases the risk of infertility. So it is now interesting to see that advanced paternal age can be a problem as well.
For those who are new to this blog, here is the theory: as a man ages, his "fertility" doesn't necessarily decline, in that his sperm count may be just fine. But it appears that when the DNA replicates, it does not replicate precisely. The older the man is, the greater the likelihood of small genetic defects appearing in his DNA as it replicates. When I say "small" genetic defects, I mean that they are not substantial enough to be fatal to the infant. But, these genetic defects are thought to be the cause of the increased risk of not only autism, as observed in this study, but also schizophrenia and cancer later in life as well.



I have posted evidence

The Vindication of Humanae vitae at Age 40

The controversial "birth control" encyclical, Humanae Vitae, "Of Human Life," has held up better than its critics expected. That is the message of this long and rewarding article by Mary Eberstadt at First Things.

Full Disclosure Notice: Mary Eberstadt is my friend.

Shameless Self Promotion: One of the talks on my Smart Sex Series CD set is called, "How Science Shows the Church has Been Right Along."

Anyhow, Mary goes through and shows that every one of Pope Paul VI's predictions about the moral and social consequences of contraception has come to pass. But one of my favorite parts of the article addresses the question of WHY the opposition to HV was so intense, when the negative consequences weren't really that hard to foresee:

It is less than coincidental that the high-mindedness of saving the planet dovetailed perfectly with a more self-interested outcome, the freer pursuit of sexuality via the Pill. Dissenting Catholics had special reasons to stress the "science of overpopulation," and so they did. In the name of a higher morality, their argument went, birth control could be defended as the lesser of two evils (a position argued by the dissenter Charles Curran, among others)….

She gives considerable attention to the new book Fatal Misconceptions:

so discredited has the overpopulation science become that this year Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly could publish Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population and garner a starred review in Publishers Weekly—all in service of what is probably the single best demolition of the population arguments that some hoped would undermine church teaching. This is all the more satisfying a ratification because Connelly is so conscientious in establishing his own personal antagonism toward the Catholic Church (at one point asserting without even a footnote that natural family planning "still fails most couples who try it").

Fatal Misconception is decisive proof that the spectacle of overpopulation, which was used to browbeat the Vatican in the name of science, was a grotesque error all along. First, Connelly argues, the population-control movement was wrong as a matter of fact: "The two strongest claims population controllers make for their long-term historical contribution" are "that they raised Asia out of poverty and helped keep our planet habitable." Both of these, he demonstrates, are false.

Even more devastating is Connelly's demolition of the claim to moral high ground that the overpopulation alarmists made. For population science was not only failing to help people, Connelly argues, but also actively harming some of them—and in a way that summoned some of the baser episodes of recent historical memory:

The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they knew it themselves. . . . The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the "unfit," or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them. It appealed to people with power because, with the spread of emancipatory movements, it began to appear easier and more profitable to control populations than to control territory. That is why opponents were essentially correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished business of imperialism.

The forty years since Humanae Vitae appeared have also vindicated the encyclical's fear that governments would use the new contraceptive technology coercively. The outstanding example, of course, is the Chinese government's long-running "one-child policy," replete with forced abortions, public trackings of menstrual cycles, family flight, increased female infanticide, sterilization, and other assaults too numerous even to begin cataloguing here—in fact, so numerous that they are now widely, if often grudgingly, acknowledged as wrongs even by international human-rights bureaucracies. Lesser-known examples include the Indian government's foray into coercive use of contraception in the "emergency" of 1976 and 1977, and the Indonesian government's practice in the 1970s and 1980s of the bullying implantation of IUDs and Norplant.

Should governments come to "regard this as necessary," Humanae Vitae warned, "they may even impose their use on everyone." As with the unintended affirmation by social science, will anyone within the ranks of the population revisionists now give credit where credit is due?

Read it all here.

The Empty European Village

My commentary on the demographic decline of Europe has just been posted on Mercator Net. For those of you unfamiliar with Mercator, , it is a pro-family, pro-human-dignity internet magazine, published by a team in Australia and New Zealand. If you look at their comments section, you will see that they have readers from all over the English speaking world.
Pretty cool, actually.

Economics for a Crowded Planet: Which One would that be?

Jeffrey Sachs evidently believes the earth is overcrowded. I can't believe I'm reading this. His book is called: Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. Which one is the crowded planet?

Sachs presents “four compelling reasons why the poorest countries need to speed the demographic transition,” “a list of seven requirements to enable family planning programs to accelerate the decline in fertility."

He has missed out on the news, even supported by the United Nations, that underpopulation is likely to be the big new problem on the horizon, not overpopulation.
To be fair, I am only quoting from a review in the NYT, and have not read the book itself. I'm not likely to, unless somebody pays me. Life is too short.

Collapse of the Family in Europe

The Times of London reports on this massive EU study of the family. Highlights:

It said that almost one million fewer babies were born in the 27 EU countries last year than in 1980. There were six million more over65s than under14s in Europe last year, against 36 million more children than pensioners in 1980.

The institute said: “Europe is now an elderly continent.” Almost one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion. The marriage rate fell by 24 per cent between 1980 and 2006. Two out of three households have no children, and nearly 28 per cent of households contain only one person.

The EU suggested solution? I'm not making this up:

The report urges national governments to set up a ministry for the family.

You might think they would ask themselves whether setting up yet another government ministry could be part of the problem, rather than the solution.
Cross-posted at Marriage Debate.

Private and Social Costs and Benefits of Children

The argument that having children pollutes the earth is really an argument against the human race itself. Quoting Europeans who have decided to forgo children for the sake of the planet, Arthur Brooks observes that this may well be an argument for avoiding the tough private costs of having kids.

The 2004 General Social Survey shows that, if two adults in 2004 were the same in age, sex, income, marital status, education, race, religion, and politics--but one had kids but the other did not--the parent would be about seven percentage points less likely than the non-parent to report being "very happy."

Furthermore, the average happiness of adults--correcting for all the other personal characteristics like before--falls as more kids are added to the family. This is true, however, only up to four kids--with the fifth, parental happiness appears to start to rise again. The reason for this is because, in modern America where the average number of children per family is close to two, a large brood generally belongs to a certain unusual type of heroic parent (who fall into the category of saints and martyrs).

These facts should not be interpreted as evidence that non-parents are, as a group, happier people than parents. People who have the most kids today generally have other traits that more than offset the children in their happiness. For example, political conservatives have far more children than liberals (41 percent more kids per couple in 2004), but their worldview brings them up more than their kids bring them down: 42 percent of conservative parents are very happy, versus 21 percent of liberal non-parents. (In case you're wondering, 52 percent of conservative non-parents are very happy.)

I am suspicious of these happiness comparisons between parents and non-parents. It seems to me that moving to parenthood changes a person's preferences so dramatically that it hardly seems fair to use the same measuring rod for happiness. Parents and non-parents derive happiness from very different things. Children draw us out of our self-centeredness in a way that nothing else can do. Taking happiness in another peron's happiness or success surely counts as a different sort of thing than finding happiness in the enjoyment of ordinary consumption items.
Or, you could look at it from the reverse side: parents have different worries and concerns than non-parents. There are a whole host of problems than simply aren't on the radar screen of the non-parent.

And it is simply not the case that children are a net burden on society. Brooks points out the social benefits to government revenues.

Economists estimate that the net benefits to society from children are, on average, significant and positive. Balancing the negative and positive socioeconomic impacts from children, one well-regarded study from 1990 in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science placed the benefit in net government revenues in excess of $100,000 per American child--a number that has obviously greatly increased since that time.

What we choose to do with this public surplus per child is obviously up to us--it reflects our society's values. As our population rises, we can use our resulting public wealth increases to ensure the preservation of our natural environment, for example. To argue against human reproduction to save the planet amounts to arguing that lowering our prosperity is the best strategy to cut resource consumption and greenhouse gases. A common complaint about the current environmental movement is that it cares more about trees than people. This complaint is certainly not weakened by arguments for negative population growth.

More children also have the potential for more productivity in the private sector as well as in generating tax revenue for the government.
Read all of Brooks' article here.
More on the connection between parenthood and happiness here.

Demographic Winter

Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute, shows that demographic decline is real, serious, and not just confined to the West. He is responding to a Nation reporter who had interviewed him and distorted his views.

Ms. Joyce, herself a creature of the feminist narrative she has created, imagines that PRI and other pro-natal groups are conspiring to keep her and her sisters barefoot and pregnant. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am quite content to let the writers, readers, and editors of The Nation make their own fertility decisions. Having largely rejected marriage for cohabitation, conception for contraception, and childbearing for abortion, I doubt if they average one child per every pair of “significant others” (or whatever they’re calling their transient liaisons these days).

I would only ask that the left show the same regard for others, both in America and around the world. Surveys show that young American women, for example, express a preference for 2.5 children or so, significantly more than the two that they are likely to actually bear. PRI’s goal, through its educational and public policy initiatives, is to make it possible for women to achieve their desired number of children.

The left, however, seems determined to treat young women (and men) as wayward children to be propagandized, contracepted, sterilized, and aborted out of their inherently pro-natal convictions. Having adopted a de facto one-child policy themselves, they are hell-bent on imposing it on the rest of us. So they continue to propagate the myth of overpopulation, zealously support Planned Parenthood and other government-subsidized contraception and sterilization services, and bitterly oppose any restrictions on abortion.

There is a panic over births after all, it turns out. But it is not, as Ms. Joyce would have it, the Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons of the pro-life, pro-family movement who are alarmed. These have bound themselves to their spouses in mutually fulfilling marriages and are happily procreating. As a result they are seeing their numbers and influence expand.

Not so the largely white and sterile readers of The Nation. Like the barren Ms. Joyce, unmarried and childless as she enters her thirties, they propagate aging and outmoded ideologies instead of making babies. Perhaps it is understandable that they are, well, panicking.

Child Man in the Promised Land

Kay Hymowitz has an insightful, though disturbing account of the enduring adolesence of the American male. I have noticed this myself, and have given it some thought. Guys playing video games and hanging out with buddies well into their thirties. Hymowitz walks right up to the explanation, but stops short:

For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it is marriage and children that turn boys into men. Now that the SYM can put off family into the hazily distant future, he can—and will—try to stay a child-man. Yesterday’s paterfamilias or Levittown dad may have sought to escape the duties of manhood through fantasies of adventures at sea, pinups, or sublimated war on the football field, but there was considerable social pressure for him to be a mensch. Not only is no one asking that today’s twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father—that is, grow up—but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything that he needs to settle down in pig’s heaven indefinitely.

Rod Dreher in the Dallas Morning News makes a similar set of observations:

As social critic Philip Rieff foresaw at the dawn of this revolution, the loosening of traditional constraints would make man free, but it would be a liberty fraught with anxiety, even psychological paralysis.

... the process of becoming a man requires a juvenile male to subordinate his own desires to an objective code of conduct – which is to say, some sort of higher authority. In this sense, the self could only be understood and realized in relation to one's community and its values.

The culture warriors of the previous generation were not wrong to question conformity, but they went too far. They have deprived their sons of authoritative tradition, both in word and example, and with it the ability to transcend the adolescent state. Much in our dominant culture conspires to keep young men in a permanent state of adolescence: conscious only of their desires and the impulse to fulfill them. This dependency is tailor-made for a consumerist economy built on creating and exploiting wants. Making the world safe for big business, no doubt, wasn't what the '60s generation had in mind, but it's a little late for do-overs.

And what exactly makes this continual postponing of adulthood possible? The elephant in the room; the naked emperor. Contraception. Think about it.

French claim European fertility prize

France now has the highest fertility rate in Europe.

With 1.98 children per woman, France's fertility rate is now ahead of Ireland on 1.90, according to the latest government figures, and well above the European Union average of 1.52.

Babies born to unmarried couples represented 50.5 of all French births in 2007, compared to 48.4 percent the previous year and merely 5.9 percent in 1965, according to the French national statistics institute INSEE.
Sociologist Irene Thery told Le Parisien newspaper this was the "logical outcome of a major revolution... Gradually, it's the child who has come to make the family, not the marriage."

France's leap back up the fertility table began in 1993, back when its fertility was only 1.66 children per woman, although it still falls just short of the 2.07 children per woman needed for generations to be replaced.

Pro-birth public policies, including universal public schooling from the age of three, and the relative affordability of childcare for infants are credited in part with the increase in fertility.

With a total of 816,500 babies born last year, France's fertility rate has dipped slightly since 2006, however, when it passed the symbolic mark of two children per woman.

Child-bearing has been separated from marriage, and the state has taken over responsibility for child support. One thing not mentioned is the relative fertility rates of European French and the African Muslim population of France. I once speculated on this difference in print. I was quickly slapped down by people who pointed out that the French don't keep statistics separated by race or national ancestry. In the US, for instance, we know that the fertility of Blacks and Hispanics is higher than non-Hispanic whites. We also know that college-educated white women have fertility rates around 1.7, well below the national average of 2.1.

It would be interesting to know the ethic composition of French fertility, but I guess it isn't knowable.

The average age of first-time mothers, rising year on year, stood at 29.8 years.

In this, the French are acting like college educated residents of Massachusetts, which had the highest age at first marriage and first child-birth, the last time I looked.

The Missing Headline

Here is my article on unmarried childbearing.

the increase in unmarried childbearing must be laid directly at the doorstep of the weird ideological cocktail that is the modern American sexual ethos: feminism, consumerism and sexual liberation. Women don’t need men. Women are entitled to have a baby if they want, when they want, on any terms they want. Sex is a private recreational activity that is no big deal.

Some adherents of this ideology believe that unmarried childbearing is actually a good thing. Modern single mothers are striking a blow for women’s independence. We can’t possibly expect the media establishment, which is really the mouthpiece for the sexual revolution, to pass judgment on the choice to become an unmarried mother, even though the data tell us that it is a really dumb choice.

Increase in Unmarried Childbearing

Maggie Gallagher has an article on this hidden nugget within the report on the increase in teen births. I expect to have something on the same topic soon....

Increasing Fertility in US

US fertility is increasing. That was implied in the story a couple of weeks ago about the rise in teen pregnancy: birth rates were rising in all age groups.
The prize for the dumbest comment goes to this UN population official:

What matters is that the U.S. is probably one of very few industrialized countries that have a fertility rate close to or at replacement level," says José Antonio Ortega, head of the fertility section at the United Nations' Population Division.... countries in Europe and Asia have launched several government initiatives to encourage more births, from financial bonuses and extended family leaves to subsidized child care.

The wide availability of birth control options and more career opportunities for women have caused fertility rates to hit low levels in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany and Russia. France, renowned for its family friendly policies, remains the exception with a fertility rate of 2.

"What is paradoxical is that the U.S. doesn't have those (family friendly) policies and it has higher fertility," Ortega says.

I consider this a dumb comment because it is so obvious to anyone even slightly acquainted with the data. Those "family friendly" policies are not about helping women have more babies. The policies are about keeping women at work and getting more work out of them. These policies do not increase the birth rate. Even France's replacement level fertility would probably evaporate, if you factored out the higher fertility rates of Muslim/African families in France. In other words, the (very expensive) policies designed to allow professional women to have babies almost certainly do not raise the fertility rate among their target population.

Family Friendly Cities

Joel Kotkin explains that the fastest growing cities are not the ones that cater to singles, but those that cater to families. Read it all here.
cross-posted at the Acton blog.