![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldEarlier this week, I had a chance to read Ben Wattenberg's Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, an examination of how fertility rates are falling below replacement levels worldwide. I touched upon this topic back in May, in my post "Staying Poor and Growing Old in the Third World". Suffice it to say that despite the tics common to American conservative writers (blanket condemnations-in-passing of Europeans as inherently anti-Semitic, a boring praise of American virility-cum-fertility, and so on), Fewer is a decent enough overview of the unexpected global decline of fertility rates around the world, in every culture that has even begun to modernize.
Fewer's problems lies in its predictions, and in its policy recommendations. He recognizes that the elements of modernity and postmodernity have discouraged childbearing: consumerism, contraception and abortion, feminism, gay rights. Wattenberg is correct to note, I think, that population shrinkage--starting first of all in the developed world, then becoming a global phenomenon--will cause many problems. Pay-as-you-go pension systems, for instance, aren't viable without sustained above-replacement fertility rates. The problem with Fewer lies in the book's advocacy of strongly pro-natalist policies.
The Tofflers commented in their Future Shock that the only way to restore the conservative social climate of the 1950s, complete with its above-replacement fertility rates, would be to impose totalitarian controls. Romania under Ceaucescu tried this as part of a plan to boost Romania's population to the level of 30 million, unleashing the full power of the Foucauldian panopticon state on Romanian women in order to ensure that they were bearing children for the nation, in part inspiring Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The results? The Catholic fundamentalist group Human Life International observed disapprovingly that "You will no doubt be shocked to hear that the first law passed after the overthrow of Dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu by the unelected National Salvation Front (NSF) government composed of senior Communist Party figures, high-ranking military officers, and prominent Romanian dissidents was to make abortion legal on demand! Not only did they legalize abortion on demand, they did it on the day after Christmas, December 26, 1989."
Googling, I found that in 1998, he debated demographic Kenneth Hill on the very subject of impending population decline. In Hill's article of 27 January 1998, he notes that the current situation of demographic aging and impending shrinkage isn't unique to our time:
Pro-natalism--including pro-natalist hysteria--was particularly strong in France, where Paul Lawrence noted in his article "Naturalisations In France, 1927-1939: The Example Of The Alpes De Haute Provence (Formerly The Basses-Alpes)"> that "[a]larmist predictions were made about how, if the birth rate continued to fall, the French population would be less than 29,000,000 by 1985." The difference? Western Europe isn't the only region, and, admittedly, fertility rates in most countries are considerably lower. Then again, these regions tend to be considerably richer and more technologically advanced than Europe in the 1930s; they can afford to support their citizens' preferences for low fertility rates much more than western Europe in the 1930s ever could.
Wattenberg's logic is flawed by the unspoken assumption that children have minimal costs, unlike the elderly. In the long run, yes, children might be net producers. For their parents, children are personally expensive. In fact, children might constitute net losses for national economies before they become producers, consuming basic goods (and diverting production away from high-end consumer goods), requiring significant expenditures (education and health care on top of necessities). In fact, if a country has a high birth rate, ity has an abundance of workers that discourages technological innovation and supports labour-intensive businesses, diminishing national wealth. For whatever its worth, a recent discussion on soc.history.what-if suggests that Mexico's failure to follow Spain into the ranks of the First World might be owing substantially to Mexico's much higher rate of population growth, of course among other factors. Pop-demographers frequently talk about high dependency ratios, of the high ratio of the elderly in 2015 to the working population. What they forget is that dependency ratios also relate to children.
Further, Wattenberg wrote for the New York Times back in March 2003, that "[n]ations with low fertility rates, meanwhile, will face major fiscal and political problems. In a pay-as-you-go pension system, for example, there will be fewer workers to finance the pensions of retirees; people will either have to pay more in taxes or work longer." There is a third option, though: junking those programs, establishing economically viable pension systems, and encouraging the elderly to enter the workforce on at least a part-time basis. Modern medicine allows people to live long and relatively healthy lives, remaining productive. Unlike children, after all, the elderly are already educated and have proven track records of productivity.
The oddest thing about Fewer is that despite surveying the multiple reasons for below-replacement fertility rates, despite demonstrating that there are good reasons for people to prefer not to bear hordes of children at the request of Church and State, Wattenberg concludes that the situation is "unnatural." This sort of attitude is best expressed (if unwittingly so) by Human Life International, this time in relation to Serbia.
That last sentence is the clincher. Last month, I wrote about the pervasive tendency in the modern world for people to have few or none children, and for these people to happy with this outcome. And why shouldn't they? Certain pro-natalist strategies--in particular, generous subsidies to prospective parents--might boost fertility rates, though if the experiences of Sweden and East Germany are anything to go by their effects will be ephemeral. People don't want to have children. It's natural for free people living in open modern and postmodern societies to not to want to be "farm animals" like Dr. Adasevic's anonymous patient. It's unnatural for people to want to radically alter this trend.
Fewer's problems lies in its predictions, and in its policy recommendations. He recognizes that the elements of modernity and postmodernity have discouraged childbearing: consumerism, contraception and abortion, feminism, gay rights. Wattenberg is correct to note, I think, that population shrinkage--starting first of all in the developed world, then becoming a global phenomenon--will cause many problems. Pay-as-you-go pension systems, for instance, aren't viable without sustained above-replacement fertility rates. The problem with Fewer lies in the book's advocacy of strongly pro-natalist policies.
The Tofflers commented in their Future Shock that the only way to restore the conservative social climate of the 1950s, complete with its above-replacement fertility rates, would be to impose totalitarian controls. Romania under Ceaucescu tried this as part of a plan to boost Romania's population to the level of 30 million, unleashing the full power of the Foucauldian panopticon state on Romanian women in order to ensure that they were bearing children for the nation, in part inspiring Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The results? The Catholic fundamentalist group Human Life International observed disapprovingly that "You will no doubt be shocked to hear that the first law passed after the overthrow of Dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu by the unelected National Salvation Front (NSF) government composed of senior Communist Party figures, high-ranking military officers, and prominent Romanian dissidents was to make abortion legal on demand! Not only did they legalize abortion on demand, they did it on the day after Christmas, December 26, 1989."
Googling, I found that in 1998, he debated demographic Kenneth Hill on the very subject of impending population decline. In Hill's article of 27 January 1998, he notes that the current situation of demographic aging and impending shrinkage isn't unique to our time:
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Net Reproduction Rate (a measure that combines both fertility and mortality to provide an indicator of long-term population growth) fell to well below unity in much of the developed world. In Britain, for example, the NRR in 1936 was 0.74, a level that would imply a population decline of 26 percent each generation and was below any level reached in the 1970s or 1980s. The rhetoric of the population-decline alarmists then was strikingly similar to yours. For example, Enid Charles, in The Twilight of Parenthood, wrote in 1934 that "in place of the Malthusian menace of over-population there is now a real danger of under-population." Charles blamed the low fertility of the time on what she called the "Acquisitive Society," in which children were "regarded as a form of capital expenditure which brings the parent no return commensurate with its investment value to society as a whole." "Statistics clearly show that the choice between a Ford and a baby is usually made in favour of the Ford." It all sounds very like Wattenberg in the 1990s, "Young men and women conceiving children ... are thinking about a good life for themselves, in quite new, modern, circumstances."
Pro-natalism--including pro-natalist hysteria--was particularly strong in France, where Paul Lawrence noted in his article "Naturalisations In France, 1927-1939: The Example Of The Alpes De Haute Provence (Formerly The Basses-Alpes)"> that "[a]larmist predictions were made about how, if the birth rate continued to fall, the French population would be less than 29,000,000 by 1985." The difference? Western Europe isn't the only region, and, admittedly, fertility rates in most countries are considerably lower. Then again, these regions tend to be considerably richer and more technologically advanced than Europe in the 1930s; they can afford to support their citizens' preferences for low fertility rates much more than western Europe in the 1930s ever could.
Wattenberg's logic is flawed by the unspoken assumption that children have minimal costs, unlike the elderly. In the long run, yes, children might be net producers. For their parents, children are personally expensive. In fact, children might constitute net losses for national economies before they become producers, consuming basic goods (and diverting production away from high-end consumer goods), requiring significant expenditures (education and health care on top of necessities). In fact, if a country has a high birth rate, ity has an abundance of workers that discourages technological innovation and supports labour-intensive businesses, diminishing national wealth. For whatever its worth, a recent discussion on soc.history.what-if suggests that Mexico's failure to follow Spain into the ranks of the First World might be owing substantially to Mexico's much higher rate of population growth, of course among other factors. Pop-demographers frequently talk about high dependency ratios, of the high ratio of the elderly in 2015 to the working population. What they forget is that dependency ratios also relate to children.
Further, Wattenberg wrote for the New York Times back in March 2003, that "[n]ations with low fertility rates, meanwhile, will face major fiscal and political problems. In a pay-as-you-go pension system, for example, there will be fewer workers to finance the pensions of retirees; people will either have to pay more in taxes or work longer." There is a third option, though: junking those programs, establishing economically viable pension systems, and encouraging the elderly to enter the workforce on at least a part-time basis. Modern medicine allows people to live long and relatively healthy lives, remaining productive. Unlike children, after all, the elderly are already educated and have proven track records of productivity.
The oddest thing about Fewer is that despite surveying the multiple reasons for below-replacement fertility rates, despite demonstrating that there are good reasons for people to prefer not to bear hordes of children at the request of Church and State, Wattenberg concludes that the situation is "unnatural." This sort of attitude is best expressed (if unwittingly so) by Human Life International, this time in relation to Serbia.
Feminists, on the other hand, heatedly charge that "propaganda" and "moral condemnations" are coming from the State and the Orthodox Church to increase the birthrate. They do not seem to notice that few are eligible to receive the Jugovic medals for mothers with four or more children when the average family has 1.77 children.
To illustrate the anti-child climate that permeates Serbia, Dr. Stoyan Adasevic did a study of 350 women requesting abortions. He found that in 92 percent of the cases their reasons had nothing to do with serious health or economic reasons, but rather abortion for convenience, as he says. After his conversion he would speak against abortifacients like the Intra-Uterine Device (IUD) to women in his gynecological practice and would frequently face hostile reactions. One said to him, "We are not farm animals to have large numbers of children."
That last sentence is the clincher. Last month, I wrote about the pervasive tendency in the modern world for people to have few or none children, and for these people to happy with this outcome. And why shouldn't they? Certain pro-natalist strategies--in particular, generous subsidies to prospective parents--might boost fertility rates, though if the experiences of Sweden and East Germany are anything to go by their effects will be ephemeral. People don't want to have children. It's natural for free people living in open modern and postmodern societies to not to want to be "farm animals" like Dr. Adasevic's anonymous patient. It's unnatural for people to want to radically alter this trend.
