Demographics

Read enough on debates, thanks -- as Willow would say: "Bored Now."

An article at Tech Central Station mixes a little politics, little demographics, a little economics -- man, life is good!

Many have pointed out that the quasi-socialist states of Western Europe are not reproducing in sufficient number to replace their populations. Over time, these nations will lose their individual culture as immigrants (mostly Muslim) become majority populations. The Netherlands, France, Italy and Sweden are headed down this road.

I may not care for socialism, but it beats sharia. The good liberals of Western Europe, like Senator Kerry, have a plan. More government-funded family policies, more babbies! N'est ce pas?

To an economist, the falling birth rate is easily explainable. We've got rich, fat and happy. This gives all of us, both male and female, more choices and more choices mean that the opportunity costs of any specific one are higher. Offered alternatives to bearing 12 children, women find that bearing one or two is quite sufficient thank you, they'd also like to have some of that self-esteem found through a career, that leisure of a sabbatical, well, simply more of the delights that modern civilization has to offer. Those who read a little Darwin might also point to modern medicine as lowering the fertility rate. Not just the availability of contraception but a change in the number of children desired instead of the number thrust upon those who enjoy the carnal delights. For if the meaning of life is to have descendants who then go on to have more (a very rough and ready outline of Darwinist theory) then the fact that almost all children survive to themselves be able to breed means you need to have fewer of them. Or, in econspeak, the opportunity cost of having few children has fallen.

The author suggests one solution: "we should all go back to being poor with no choices in order to raise the birth rate"

Of course, the liberal intellectuals are unencumbered by empirical evidence:

The country with the most family orientated policies I can think of is Sweden; extensive leave for both parents, universal childcare, 80% marginal tax rates (adding direct and indirect) making extra work rather than raising kids valueless, essentially a liberal's wet dream. The fertility rate is 1.54 births per woman.

The UK, which is much less accommodating to the needs of mothers and their children, has one of 1.65.

You might also be interested in noting that the USA, a place where people work the longest hours of any rich country, where anything more than a few days off for the stitches to take after parturition is regarded as malingering, where paid paternity leave is almost unheard of once it is confirmed that the babbie can work out how to suck on a teat, that hellhole of family unfriendly policies has a fertility rate of 2.07. It might just be different immigration rates of course, as first generation such are known to be more philoprogenitive but then Sweden has a higher rate than the UK, 5.4% to 4%, of foreign born residents.

I was brainwashed by a Math Professor at the University of Colorado when I was a young man. I went to an engineering recruitment week for the school and heard an impassioned speech (this would've been about 1977 or so) that overpopulation would kill the whole planet. We were in immediate peril.

Richard Lamm was governor at that time, and he made the same projections. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. It was only recently that I was able to wean myself off of these wrong-headed beliefs.

The discussion question, for those of you playing the Berkeley Square Blog Home Game, is: "will these demographic projections rectify themselves, Calvin Coolidge style, just as the Malthusian over-population projections have?

Posted by jk at October 1, 2004 10:51 AM