4
February 2013 –
Jonathan V. Last, senior
writer at the Weekly Standard and author of “What to Expect When No One’s
Expecting: American’s Coming Demographic Disaster”, has some painful things to
say about the effects on the United States of the sustained, falling fertility
rates in our society. I thank my third son for sending an
essay written by Mr. Last on this important subject.
I prefer to use
the term birth rates instead of fertility rates, the latter being the term the
scientific community use to describe the number of children an average woman
bears over the course of her life. To me, fertility describes
potential; birth describes an event. We are talking about
events. Here are some of the salient facts gleaned from Mr. Last’s
essay, compiled from his book, about the falling birth rates throughout the world.
1. The replacement rate for humans is a birth rate
of 2.1. Higher than that, the population grows. Lower
than that, the population contracts.
2. The U.S. total birth rate is 1.93, 1.6 for
white, college-educated women.
3. Unlike the forced one-child policy in China,
which results in a birth rate of 1.54, the birth rates in the U.S. are chosen.
4. The sustainment birth rate of 2.1 has not been
met since the 1970s in the United States.
5. The ONLY reason the U.S. has increased in
population in the last decades is because of immigration. The
percentage of foreign-born U.S. citizens now is the highest it has been in over
100 years (U.S. Census figures). Middle-class America, in fact, most
of America, is simply not replacing itself.
6. We are not alone in the world: 97% of
the world has falling birth rates. Europe’s birth rate is about
1.5. China’s is 1.54. Japan’s is 1.3. Even
Latin America’s birth rate, including Mexico’s, will soon fall below 2.1. Fewer
immigrants to keep America a young, productive society.
Ouch!
7. When the sustainment birth rate is not reached,
the population grows older. More old people to take care of by fewer
young people. Last year in Japan, there were more adult diapers sold
than baby diapers. Then, when the old people die off, the population
contracts. This unbalanced demographic model effects harshly every
aspect of the economy and the culture for generations. We saw
it when we lived in China, Japan, Korea, and Europe.
8. The effects of a falling birth rate cannot be
corrected overnight. It takes as long to correct the situation as it
did to create it. The babies born today cannot overnight become the
20-35 year-old workers needed to support the large numbers of old people. Even
if the birth rate were to jump to 4.0 starting in nine months, gaps will exist
for a generation that simply will have to be endured.
Why is this happening in
the United States in particular? Mr. Last says that our ever-more
generous Social Security system and Medicare make it not necessary to have
children to support you when you are old; more young women than ever are
attending college and, thereby, delaying marriage and shortening their
childbearing opportunities; increasingly expensive urban environments pressure
people to have smaller families; finally, it simply is not much fun to have
children.
My comments:
I expand Mr. Last’s
final reason and say that the increased affluence of the last three generations
gives young women more fun and easier options than early marriage. Baby
boomers, born from 1946 through the sixties, started to have children in the
late sixties and early seventies. This time frame corresponded with
the start of the extended drop in birth rates in the U.S. Because of
their parents, Baby Boomers had more economic advantages at an earlier age than
did their parents, who had lived through the Great Depression and World War
II. Boomers also took advantage of the advent of wide-spread birth
control methods not available earlier. Understandably, the Boomers chose
to have fewer children because life was easier, more fun, without them. Now,
baby boomer offspring have become another generation of adults having even
fewer children, for the same reasons their parents limited the size of their
families.
I am not going to
discuss the economic problems of a smaller and smaller work force trying to
support a larger and larger non-work force. I think it is obvious,
and it is a crisis. It also leads to discussions of government
manipulation of tax codes and other programs, which may alleviate the symptoms
of a fallen birth rate but not necessarily cure the disease. Falling
birth rates is a societal problem and not a government one. To look
to the government to resolve the symptoms is to tacitly accept more government
control of our lives in the name of ease. This is a societal issue
that needs to be addressed by the people, not the government.
We need to quit
the cycle of creating what they call in China, “Little Emperors”, out of the
one or two children in a U.S. family. In China, many circumstances
are different than in the United States, but their effect on the children in
small families is often the same. In China, the family alone
supports people in their old age. With the imposed one-child policy
and increased life span, the Unlucky Seven model now dominates family
relations. Two sets of grandparents, four in that generation, beget
one child each to make two parents in that generation. They beget
one child, preferably a boy, who will be asked to take care of the other six
when he reaches working age and the parents and grandparents are old. What
would you do if you were a grandparent or parent of that one child? The
Chinese shower that child with every advantage and privilege they can in the
hope that the child will feel obligated to pay them back with support in their
dotage. The result is that most middle and upper class children in
China lack for nothing and expect everything as their right. The
opposite of what the older generation has hoped for is occurring with common
frequency. The family is dissolving and the little emperors are
delaying marriage even longer, building their primary emotional support
structures outside the family, and selfishly enjoying what their parents
provided for them. When we lived in China, we saw the ever
widening phenomenon of the Little Emperors and about the fears of the older
generations and their bleak futures.
In the United
States, I fear that the effects of smaller families and increased affluence
have created at least one generation of Little Emperors and Empresses as
well. Baby Boomers, growing up in the increased affluence of their
parents’ efforts, often did not learn and, therefore, did not teach their
children, that responsibility to family, not the economic advantages a family
provides, is what keeps families strong and committed to each other. Their
children have done the same to the even smaller numbers of their
children. Why should the young adults of today feel deep
responsibilities to family when sacrificing little for others, particularly in
the family, was the norm in their lives? What exacerbates family
dissolution in the U.S. over the China model is that government entitlement
programs such as Social Security and Medicare relieve the young generation of
even more responsibility toward their parents and grandparents. Who
raised in the last two “ME” generations can resist the temptation to say that
it is indeed government’s problem to take care of older people, not
theirs? This is not to say that Social Security and Medicare should
be done away with. I say simply that the worst effect on society of
the falling birth rate of the last few generations is its erosion of family
cohesion. Essential tasks that used to be performed by family
members for family members, those tasks that should still build strength and
allegiance in what used to be the bedrock institution of society, are now
increasingly being performed by the government. We now are
increasingly alone as youth and as old people. We as a people
will die alone as well.
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