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Capitol Ideas
Population, Economy, and God
Western fertility decline is now deplored even by an inventor of the Pill.
World population, once “exploding,” is still increasing, and “momentum” ensures that it will do so for decades to come. But fertility rates have tumbled. In Europe every country has fallen below replacement level. Some governments, especially France’s, are beginning to use financial incentives to restore fertility rates but the effort, if generous enough to work—by paying women to have a third child—could bankrupt the welfare state.
In rich countries, a total fertility rate of 2.1 babies per woman is needed if population is to remain stable. But in the European Union as a whole the rate is down to 1.5. Germany is at 1.4, and Italy, Spain, and Greece are at 1.3. The fertility rate in France is now 2.0, or close to replacement. But the uneasy question is whether this is due to subsidies or to the growing Muslim population.
All over the world, with a few anomalies, there is a strong inverse correlation between GDP per capita and babies per family. It’s a paradox, because wealthier people can obviously afford lots of children. But very predictably they have fewer. Hong Kong (1.02), Singapore, and Taiwan are three of the richest countries in the world, and three of the four lowest in total fertility. The countries with the highest fertility rates are Mali (7.4), Niger, and Uganda. Guess how low they are on the wealth chart.
Here’s a news item. Carl Djerassi, one of the inventors of the birth control pill, recently deplored the sharp decline of total fertility in Austria (1.4), the country of his birth. A Catholic news story seized on that and reported that one of the pill’s inventors had said the pill had caused a “demographic catastrophe.” Austria’s leading Catholic, Cardinal Schönborn, said the Vatican had predicted 40 years ago that the pill would promote a dramatic fall in birth rates.
Djerassi, 85, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford, did warn of a catastrophe and he said that Austria should admit more immigrants. But he denied that people have smaller families “because of the availability of birth control.” They do so “for personal, economic, cultural, and other reasons,” of which “changes in the status of women” was the most important. Japan has an even worse demographic problem, he said, “yet the pill was only legalized there in 1999 and is still not used widely.” (Japan’s fertility rate is 1.22.) (In fact, if the pill and abortion really were illegal more children surely would be born, if only because unintentional pregnancies would come to term.)
Austrian families who had decided against children wanted “to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it,” Djerassi also said. That may have rankled because the country had just put his face on a postage stamp.
SO WHAT IS CAUSING these dramatic declines? It’s under way in many countries outside Europe too. In Mexico, fertility has moved down close to replacement level—having been as high as six babies per woman in the 1970s.
Obviously economic growth has been the dominant factor but there are other considerations. Young couples hardly read Paul Ehrlich before deciding whether to have children, but scaremonger- ing authors have played a key role in creating our anti-natalist mood. Books warning of a (then) newfangled emergency, the “population explosion,” began appearing soon after World War II. Consider Road to Survival (1948), by William Vogt, or People! Challenge to Survival, by the same author. An anti-people fanatic before his time, Vogt was hypnotized by the Malthusian doctrine that population growth would overtake the food supply. That would lead to a war of all against all. Paul Ehrlich projected that the 1980s would see massive die-offs from starvation. (Obesity turned out to be the greater health threat.)
In that earlier period, the population controllers didn’t feel they had to mince words. Vogt wrote in 1960 that “tens of thousands of children born every year in the United States should, solely for their own sakes, never have seen the light of day.… There are hundreds of thousands of others, technically legitimate since their parents have engaged in some sort of marriage ritual, but whose birth is as much of a crime against them as it is against the bastards.”
At a time when the world population still had not reached 3 billion—today it is 6.7 billion—Vogt thought “drastic measures are inescapable.” He warned of “mounting population pressures in the Soviet Union,” where, by the century’s end, “there may be 300 million Russians.” It was time for them “to begin control of one of the most powerful causes of war—overpopulation.”
Note: the population of Russia by 2000 was 145 million; today it is 141 million. (Fertility rate: 1.4.) Population alarmists have long enjoyed the freedom to project their fears onto whatever cause is uppermost in the progressive mind. Then it was war. Today it is the environment, which, we are told, human beings are ruining. This will be shown to have been as false as the earlier warnings, but not before our environmental scares have done much harm to a fragile economy (at the rate things are going with Obama). All previous scares were based on faulty premises, and the latest one, based on “science,” will be no different.
I believe that two interacting factors shape population growth or decline: economic prosperity and belief in God. As to the first, there is no doubt that rising material prosperity discourages additional children. Fewer infants die; large families are no longer needed to support older parents. The welfare state—which only rich countries can afford—has greatly compounded this effect. When people believe that the government will take care of them, pay their pensions and treat their maladies, children do seem less essential.
A rise in prosperity also encourages people to think that they can dispense with God. Religion diminishes when wealth increases—that’s my theory. But with a twist that I shall come to. Wealth generates independence, including independence from God, or (if you will) Providence. God is gradually forgotten, then assumed not to exist. This will tend to drive childbearing down even further. Hedonism will become predominant. Remember, Jesus warned that it’s the rich, not the poor, who are at spiritual hazard.
The legalization of abortion reflected the decline of religious faith in America, but it must also have led others to conclude that God was no longer to be feared. That’s why I don’t quite believe Djerassi when he tries to disassociate the pill from fertility. The ready availability of the pill told society at large that sex without consequences was perfectly acceptable. Then, by degrees, that self-indulgent view became an anti-natalist worldview.
It became so ingrained that many people now think it obvious. Sex became a “free” pastime as long as it was restricted to consenting adults. Furthermore, anyone who questioned that premise risked denunciation as a bigot.
About the Author
Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).
Letter to the Editor View all comments (35) | Leave a comment
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Deborah D | 5.12.09 @ 7:19AM
And thus, DM proves Mr. Bethel's many excellent points.
God save us from stupid enviro-wacko-liberals, who think they're smarter than God.
Appleby| 5.12.09 @ 7:43AM
Here in Toronto the average condo is 400 square feet and costs $300,000. Where are people supposed to stack their kids? If you are living, as the Watermelon Greenies (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) demand, in a cubicle on the 61st floor of a high rise with a view of nothing but other high-rises, and walking or bicycling to work in another high-rise, where do your kids play and how do you look after them? And if you are paying $2,000 a month for that cubicle, including huge taxes levied so the Mayor can frivol the money away on Street Furniture and enormous downtown parties, and trying to close down the Island Airport which is the only thing in town that actually makes money, how do you afford private school -- because lockdowns due to knifings and shootings are pretty regular in the public schools, and our schools are consistently the lowest rated schools in the country?
Where is the incentive, even if you do get a year off with pay as a reward for getting pregnant?
I am looking forward to seeing socialism collapse though, when there are not enough wage slaves to fund this ponzi scheme. It will be happening soon.
PolishKnight| 5.12.09 @ 10:50AM
The author mentioned many things and touched on the issue, ("the status of women"), but if he turned it around the answer would be clear: The status of men, and especially MARRIED WORKING men, has been undermined and even attacked for the past 40 years. Only a few conservatives such as Schlafly have observed that when colleges brag about women's enrollment rates of 60%+ that it will be difficult for these women to marry and have children when they seek to marry up at a later time. Policies that punish married men for supporting a family such as alimony and one-side-takes-all custody policies in the event of a divorce scares away young men. Divorce lawyers are now legally obligated to advise women that false allegations of abuse are indispensible as divorce and custody tools.
Reap (or in this case, don't reap) what you sow.
JRS240| 5.12.09 @ 11:05AM
Tom Bethell's closing paragragh sums it up: Western Civilization is untethering itself from a faith in God. Rejecting God, and seeing no good come from it, Men are gradually rejecting themselves.
The end result will be pure nihilism.
Piper1| 5.12.09 @ 12:32PM
Another interesting thing about Vermont: it has to be the state with the largest percentage population of open homosexuals in the country.
My wife and I visited Manchester, Vermont a few years ago and were shocked at how many men we saw walking the streets holding hands. We were even more shocked a year later when our hostess informed us that her husband had left her for a man.
I have no doubt that this fact weighs heavily in the Vermont courts' notorious laxity when it comes to child predators. (Bill O'Reilly has been raising the roof about this for years.)
Not sure whether a lack of children and religious belief leads to a large gay population or the other way around, but they sure all do seem to go together.
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Tom--
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Charles Martel| 5.12.09 @ 3:51PM
I keep getting to these comment sections too late to see the latest inanity from the house leftist.
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Pat| 5.12.09 @ 3:59PM
Like a herd of cows sharing a "mood", the American public dimly senses that things aren't looking good for the future. It wasn't supposed to be that way - technical progress means our lives simply become better and better - nothing can stop that from happening - right?
With 70 million Boomers on the doorstep of senior citizenhood, the economic signs aren't encouraging and the root problem keeps coming back to good old demographics. Plan to ciphon off some home equity for those retirement dreams? Guess again. Home prices will continue dropping, the young couples that need homes for their growing families aren't there - who will buy those 4 bedroom, 3.5 bath palaces at exorbitant prices when the older homeowners think about downsizing? That mythical demand won't materialize and home prices will maintain their downward spiral.
And don't even talk about Social Security and Medicare - you don't want to go there. With a sharp increase in taxpayer supported medical costs in the year before death, Europe is leading the way with state sanctioned euthanasia of the old and helpless - and America eventually follows Europe in social progress innovations.
Forming old folks' political coalitions to lay some heavy payroll taxes on the young is the plan to fund future social security shortfalls, but will it work? More than likely not; the old geezers can vote themselves increases in state welfare but the young aren't likely to sacrifice their working lives for their seniors. More probably, the working age before retirement will continue to increase with the government finding jobs that 75 to 80 year old seniors, with reduced stamina and attention span, can handle.
Looks like the "technology makes for progress" joke is on us after all. Life isn't really better through chemistry.
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Matteo| 5.12.09 @ 11:31PM
"Large families are no longer needed to support older parents."
I think that perhaps we are slowly starting to find out that this was an incorrect assumption.
Vaemar| 5.13.09 @ 5:10AM
There is an easy solution to this if only there is the political will to implement it: give large families better tax-breaks!
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ccc| 5.13.09 @ 5:27PM
There is insufficient evidence that any problems will occur from falling populations. Human populations are well known to go through periods of increase and decrease it is all completely natural and there is nothing that people could do about even if it were a man made problem.
Alan Brooks| 5.13.09 @ 7:27PM
VT. is more conservative than you think, if you live in northern VT, say the Northeast Kingdom, it is extremely conservative.
PNMNM| 5.13.09 @ 7:51PM
The pill has been the modern answer to the initial commandment, to be fruitful and multiply. With its acceptance, sterile sex has become the norm. It is no wonder that homosexual activity and other sexual perversions have become rampant, and abortion is no longer taboo. The pill has also abrogated the natural relationship between men and women so that courtship is far more difficult today. One could go on and on about what the pill has done to human society. The irony of all of this is that the seculars are not replacing themselves. If survival of the fittest is operative for a species, those holding the me-first position are not reproducing. Those people who truly subscribe to the will of the Creator are the ones having the most children. Truly, the meek will inherit the earth.
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