{"id":3591,"date":"2013-02-25T20:10:46","date_gmt":"2013-02-26T01:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=3591"},"modified":"2013-02-25T20:10:46","modified_gmt":"2013-02-26T01:10:46","slug":"more-on-where-have-all-the-babies-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2013\/02\/25\/economics\/more-on-where-have-all-the-babies-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"More on “Where have all the Babies Gone?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apropos<\/em> the baby bust discussed in my last post, an interesting article on the subject by Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel recently turned up at The Daily Beast via Newsweek\u00a0entitled, “Where have all the Babies Gone<\/a>?”\u00a0 According to the authors, “More and more Americans are childless by choice.\u00a0 But what makes sense for the individual may spell disaster for the country as a whole.”\u00a0 Their forebodings of doom are based on a subset of the reasons cited in Jonathan Last’s “What to Expect when No One’s Expecting,” and are the same as those that usually turn up in similar articles.\u00a0 The lack of babies, “….is likely to propel us into a spiral of soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor, and create a culture marked by hyperindividualism and dependence on the state as the family unit erodes.”\u00a0 As I pointed out in my earlier post on the subject, if all these things really will result absent a constantly increasing population, they are not avoidable outcomes, for the simple reason that, at some point, the population of the planet must stop growing.\u00a0 The only question is, how many people will be around to experience those outcomes when they happen, and what fraction of the planet’s depleted resources will still be around at the time to deal with the situation.\u00a0 Many of the commenters on the article do an excellent job of pointing that out.\u00a0 For example, from Si 1979,<\/p>\n

At some point the population has to stop growing, space on the earth is finite.\u00a0 As such there is going to come a generation that needs to ‘take the hit’ and the earlier that hit is taken the easier it will be.\u00a0 The larger the population gets the worse an ageing population each generation will experience.\u00a0 We can take the hit now or leave future generations a much worse problem to deal with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To deal with\u00a0the “problem,” the authors propose some of the usual “solutions”;<\/p>\n

These include such things as reforming the tax code to encourage marriage and children; allowing continued single-family home construction on the urban periphery and renovation of more child-friendly and moderate-density urban neighborhoods; creating extended-leave policies that encourage fathers to take more time with family, as has been modestly successfully in Scandinavia; and other actions to make having children as economically viable, and pleasant, as possible. Men, in particular, will also have to embrace a greater role in sharing child-related chores with women who, increasingly, have careers and interests of their own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a father of children who has strongly encouraged his own children to have children as well, I am fully in favor of all such measures, as long as they remain ineffective.<\/p>\n

The baby promoters have remarkably short historical memories.\u00a0 Are they unaware of the other side of this coin?\u00a0 One need go no further back than the 20th century.\u00a0 What spawned Hitler’s grandiose dreams of “Lebensraum in the east” for Germany, at the expense of Russia?\u00a0 Hint:\u00a0 It wasn’t a declining German population.\u00a0 Why did the Japanese come up with the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” idea and start invading their neighbors?\u00a0 It happened at a time when her population was expanding at a rapid pace, and was, by the way, only about half of what it is now.\u00a0 In spite of that, in the days before miracle strains of rice and other grains, it seemed impossible that she would be able to continue to feed her population.\u00a0 Have we really put such fears of famine behind us for all times?\u00a0 Such a claim must be based on the reckless assumption that the planet will never again suffer any serious disruptions in food production.\u00a0 These are hardly isolated examples.\u00a0 A book by Henry Cox entitled The Problem of Population<\/em>, which appeared in 1923 and is still available on Amazon, cites numerous other examples.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, I don’t share the fears of the Kotkins and Siegels of the world.\u00a0 My fear is that we will take foolhardy risks with the health of our planet by spawning unsustainably large populations in the name of maintaining entitlements which mankind has somehow incomprehensibly managed to live without for tens of thousands of years.\u00a0 In truth, we live in wonderful times.\u00a0 I and those genetically close to me can procreate without limit on a planet where the population may soon begin to decline to within sustainable limits because increasing numbers of people have decided not to have children.\u00a0 It’s a win-win.\u00a0 I’m happy with their choice, and presumably, they’re happy with mine, assuming they want to have some remnant of a working population available to exploit (or at least try to) once they’ve retired.\u00a0 My only hope is that people like Kotkin and Siegel don’t succeed in rocking the boat.<\/p>\n

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Apropos the baby bust discussed in my last post, an interesting article on the subject by Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel recently turned up at The Daily Beast via Newsweek\u00a0entitled, “Where have all the Babies Gone?”\u00a0 According to the authors, “More and more Americans are childless by choice.\u00a0 But what makes sense for the individual … Continue reading “More on “Where have all the Babies Gone?””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[189,35,43,107],"tags":[192,190],"class_list":["post-3591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-demographics","category-economics","category-environment","category-population","tag-doomsayers","tag-population-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-VV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3591"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3593,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3591\/revisions\/3593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}