If this is actually a disaster, then it would be nice to have an institution that society could work through to encourage and support heterosexual couples in deciding to have children.

But that's just crazy talk.

Demographers concerned that U.S. fertility rate is at an all time low.

Or it could just be a decline in teen pregnancy rates, which seems like what we've been aiming at for years.

Yay, secular liberalism!!!!

Denmark has to run ads begging Danes to make babies and now Spain has to appoint a "Tsar of Reproduction."

How screwed up is Civilization 3.0 when it can't get this basic, most fundamental requirement of a thriving civilization right?

Now, if only there was an institution that could address the issue of making babies.

We had that, but we lost it.

Isn't this, by definition, what it means to be a dying culture?

More people dying in Europe than being born.

A culture that despises children is a culture on its way to extinction.

An Israeli mom reflects on the social ostracism that followed becoming a parent.

Nevertheless, a few years ago, when I was about 34 and my biological clock started waking me up in the morning, I thought I’d carefully bring the subject to the table. It was met with equal amounts of ridicule, contempt, and pity. Some of my friends treated me as if I declared myself a right-wing fascist or just stared at me as if they felt sorry for me for leaving the realm of rational thought and voluntarily crossing over to the other side—the side of brain-dead baby-talk. Having a baby, they explained, is akin to throwing your life away. The thought of not fitting into your skinny jeans for a few months or missing out on nights of debauchery in the presence of some highly regarded international DJ is considered by some a fate worse than death.

For months before I got pregnant, my friends tried to convince me that having a baby would be a horrible mistake. They emailed me links to academic studies and research showing that children don’t, in fact, make you happy. They told me that wishing to reproduce is narcissistic. I couldn’t always argue with their logic, and in hindsight I must admit that they were right in predicting that once I had a baby, I’d be having more conversations about the different shades and textures of poo than political debates or semiotic analysis of films.

But their ignorance turned into outright denial when I actually did get knocked up. From week to week my belly grew, but my friends around the Friday café table didn’t seem to notice—or, maybe, they didn’t want to notice. At one point I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to blatantly point to my baby bump. The first reaction was a series of blank looks. Then: “What? You got a new shirt?”

***

A few months after my boyfriend and I became parents, we found out we weren’t invited to an afternoon barbecue at a friend’s house. I tried to remember if one of us said anything to annoy him, or if a notorious ex might be on the guest list, thwarting our invitation. After some unsuccessful speculation, I decided to confront my friend, who simply said that he was sorry, but the other guests didn’t want babies at their party. I assumed even baby-haters know that a sleeping infant in a baby-carrier wouldn’t be much of an imposition, but maybe they were afraid I’d be so rude as to breastfeed while people are eating—a vulgar and thoughtless act that might propel someone to lose his spareribs.

Jeepers, if only we had some kind of way of identifying those men and women who wanted to take the great risk of forming permanent partnerships for the purpose of having children and then raising them...We could call it... I don't know...something like "marriage" ....and then we could specially honor those people in that relationship in light of the fact that by having children they were helping in a special way to maintain the vitality of their community...

....nah, that's a crazy idea

U.S. birthrate plummets to its lowest level since 1920

The U.S. birthrate plunged last year to a record low, with the decline being led by immigrant women hit hard by the recession, according to a study released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The overall birthrate decreased by 8 percent between 2007 and 2010, with a much bigger drop of 14 percent among foreign-born women. The overall birthrate is at its lowest since 1920, the earliest year with reliable records. The 2011 figures don’t have breakdowns for immigrants yet, but the preliminary findings indicate that they will follow the same trend.
 

The decline could have far-reaching implications for U.S. economic and social policy. A continuing decrease could challenge long-held assumptions that births to immigrants will help maintain the U.S. population and create the taxpaying workforce needed to support the aging baby-boom generation.
 

The United States is following the Way of Japan, where this year more adult diapers were sold than baby diapers.

We are going to enter the "how could we have known" cycle of history after using up our social capital playing the "what could it hurt" game. 

Let your patriotism explode, raise that flag...

...and as many other double entendres as you can pack into a three minute rap video featuring Mentos and your national duty to make babies.

In Singapore, it's your duty to make babies on August 9:

Yesterday was National Day in Singapore, a day to commemorate the country’s separation from Malaysia in 1965. The event is traditionally marked by a parade, but this year the evening’s festivities might have been more memorable. A little over a week ago, the candy maker Mentos released a commercial promoting “National Night”—a call for Singaporeans to do their civic duty and make babies.

Singapore’s birth rate is at a record low. Female citizens of the country now give birth to about one child in their lifetime, a number that used to be much higher. (American women, by comparison, have about 2 children.) According to a video released by Singapore’s government, the city-state needs to produce about 50,000 children per year to maintain its population and avoid the economic calamity associated with an aging citizenry. But the current birth rate is less than 30,000 children per year. To combat the problem, last month the government sought ideas from the public; that’s when The Freshmaker popped in.

Muslim world facing a fertility shortage.

From the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute:

Fertility rates of Muslim populations around the world have almost literally fallen off a cliff, so steep has been their decline. Policy makers at the UN and elsewhere have barely noticed this.

“There remains a widely perceived notion --- still commonly held within intellectual, academic, and policy circles in the West and elsewhere --- that ‘Muslim’ societies are especially resistant to embarking upon the path of demographic and familial change that has transformed population profiles in Europe, North America, and other ‘more developed’ areas,” write Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah in the June 1 issue of Policy Review.

It is generally thought that Muslim fertility rates are growing by leaps and bounds. This has fed into the panic about growing Muslim influence, especially in Europe. While Eberstadt and Shah do not deal specifically with Muslims in Europe, they do point out that fertility rates have declined all over the Muslim world and that predominantly Muslim countries have taken a steeper dive than any countries in history.

Using data from the UN Population Division, which projects fertility rates for 190 countries, Eberstadt and Shah “appraise the magnitude of fertility declines in 48 of the world’s 49 identified Muslim-majority countries and territories.” The data show that “forty-eight Muslim-majority countries and territories witnessed fertility decline over the past three decades.”

When absolute fertility decline is examined, Eberstadt and Shah show “a drop of an estimated 2.6 births per woman between 1975 and 1980 and 2005 and 2010 --- a markedly larger absolute decline than estimated for either the world as a whole (-1.3) or the less developed regions as a whole (-2.2) during those same years.” They point out that “Fully eighteen of these Muslim-majority places saw (total fertility rates) fall by three or more over those 30 years--with nine of them by four births per woman or more.”

Eberstadt and Shah point out that in terms of relative fertility decline, “the estimated population-weighted average for Muslim-majority areas as a whole was -41 percent over these three decades.” They show that “22 Muslim-majority countries and territories were estimated to have undergone fertility declines of 50 percent or more during those three decades--ten of them by 60 percent or more. For both Iran and the Maldives, the declines in total fertility rates over those 30 years were estimated to exceed 70 percent.”

Out of the ten biggest declines in total fertility rates in the post-war era “six have occurred in Muslim-majority countries” say Eberstadt and Shah.

Eberstadt and Shah point out several implications to this reality of rapid fertility reduction in the Muslim world. The UN population projections will have to follow suit. In 2000, the UN projected 102 million Yemenis by the year 2050. This estimate was reduced to 62 million ten years later.

Eberstadt and Shah say there is a “coming decline in working-age (15-64) population.” They say the Muslim world will face increasing and crippling manpower shortages. They also project rapidly aging populations such as is experienced in the far-richer European countries.

The authors are perplexed that other experts at the UN or even in the Muslim countries themselves do not discuss this galloping problem.

Can we just acknowledge that the secularist experiment has failed wherever it's been tried?

Japan faces demographic disaster:

Eberstadt has spent years writing about the challenges posed by declining fertility around the globe. But Japan, he notes, is a unique case. The Japanese birthrate hovers around just 1.3 children per woman, far below the level required to maintain a stable population. Thanks to increasing life expectancy, by 2040 “there could almost be one centenarian on hand to welcome each Japanese newborn.” Over the same period, the overall Japanese population is likely to decline by 20 percent, with grim consequences for an already-stagnant economy and an already-strained safety net.

Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan is one of the world’s least religious nations, the marriage rate has plunged and the divorce rate is higher than in Northern Europe.

Yet the traditional stigma around out-of-wedlock childbearing endures, which means that unmarried Japanese are more likely to embrace “voluntary childlessness” than the unwed parenting that’s becoming an American norm. And the traditional Japanese suspicion of immigration (another possible source for demographic vitality) has endured into the 21st century as well. Eberstadt notes that “in 2009 Japan naturalized barely a third as many new citizens as Switzerland, a country with a population only 6 percent the size of Japan’s and a reputation of its own for standoffishness.”

These trends are forging a society that sometimes evokes the infertile Britain in James’s dystopia. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and there were rashes of Internet-enabled group suicides in the last decade. Rental “relatives” are available for sparsely attended wedding parties; so-called “babyloids” — furry dolls that mimic infant sounds — are being developed for lonely seniors; and Japanese researchers are at the forefront of efforts to build robots that resemble human babies. The younger generation includes millions of so-called “parasite singles” who still live with (and off) their parents, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the “hikikomori” — “young adults,” Eberstadt writes, “who shut themselves off almost entirely by retreating into a friendless life of video games, the Internet and manga (comics) in their parents’ home.”

It seems that making the individual the measure of all things doesn't work in the long run.

Population Growth - a Revisionist Approach.

More scenes from our "Brave New World."

Thanks to ultrasound and abortion, India faces a gender imbalance.

When you take a closer look at the statistics, you find some surprising and scary figures – the ratio of female children to males born actually declined here over the last 10 years – from 933 females for every thousand males in the 2001 census, to just 914 in 2011. The combination of cheap portable ultrasound technology and a decades-old preference for male babies — who are seen as breadwinners — has enabled sex-selective abortions and made worse female infanticide. In a place as wide and as vast as India, these are things that are hard to control, no matter how illegal.

And:

A village elder told me that he estimated some 70% of the men there were unmarried. There were a variety of historical causes – lack of industrialization, an unwillingness to marry outside caste and regional lines – and most recently, a rapidly declining supply of brides. There are over 350 unmarried men over 35 – this a remarkable figure for rural India, where people marry very young – some as early as 15. There are hundreds more under 35, but there are so many that no one can confirm the numbers.

According to The Economist:

Without intervention, just a few more boys would be born than girls. If you compare the number of girls actually born to the number that would have been born had a normal sex ratio prevailed, then 600,000 Indian girls go missing every year. This is less distorted than the sex ratio in China, but whereas China’s ratio has stabilised, India’s is widening, and has been for decades. Sex selection is now invading parts of the country that used not to practise it.

What that means is that in India there will be tens of millions of unmarried men in the population.  Given the historic relationship between unmarried men in a population and crime and social unrest, that can't be good news.

Apparently, it is a problem that runs throughout Asia:

In a presentation at the Fourth Asia-Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights in India, the French demographer Christophe Guilmoto, warned that future deficits of adult women would affect the stability of the entire marriage system and lead to social unrest where men were likely to be violent against women.


There are 2.1 billion men and 1.9 billion women across Asia. Some Asian countries have between 5 and 20 per cent more men than women.

In a study of sex selection in China, India, Nepal and Vietnam, Dr Guilmoto estimated that by 2050, the number of men would outweigh that of women by 33 million in India and by 25 million in China - even if current rates of gender imbalance declined.

This could lead to a large number of men having to migrate to find partners or to an increase in sex trafficking, said Dr Guilmoto.

There is also an interesting religious/sociological angle:

Among the Christians and the Muslims, the sex ratio is relatively higher. There is no such social practice of female foeticide and infanticide among them. This is one of the reasons of no decline in the size of their population but the population of Hindus has declined. This decline was 25.1 per cent during 1981-91 and 20.3 per cent during 1991-2001 with the relative difference of 4.8 per cent decline among them. The Christian population remains almost constant but the Muslim population in India increased by 34.5 per cent during 1981-91 and 36.0 per cent during 1991 2001 with the relative difference of 1.5 per cent increase among the Muslims as against 4.8 per cent decline in Hindu population. This decline may be contributed to the alarming decline in the gender ratio among the Hindus. We observe that the sex ratio among the Hindus, and also among the Jains and the Sikhs, who are also counted as Hindus is the lowest as compared to other religious communities (Table 8).

Genital Mutilation and Democracy....

...and Asians and wheat prices.

Spengler has written a polymathic essay on Egypt.

First, there is the issue of female genital mutilation which is practiced in Egypt to a horrific extent:

Nine out of ten Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation. US President Barack Obama said Jan. 29, "The right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny … are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere." Does Obama think that genital mutilation is a human rights violation? To expect Egypt to leap from the intimate violence of traditional society to the full rights of a modern democracy seems whimsical.


In fact, the vast majority of Egyptians has practiced civil disobedience against the Mubarak regime for years. The Mubarak government announced a "complete" ban on genital mutilation in 2007, the second time it has done so - without success, for the Egyptian population ignored the enlightened pronouncements of its government. Do Western liberals cheer at this quiet revolt against Mubarak's authority?

Well, no.  This is the kind of conundrum that induces a quiet cheer for the Cromwells and Francos of history who put a lid on the fanatics who would make democracy a living hell.

Then there is the food problem.  In a nutshell, Asian wealth is stripping food from Egyptian stores:

In this case, Asian demand has priced food staples out of the Arab budget. As prosperous Asians consume more protein, global demand for grain increases sharply (seven pounds of grain produce one pound of beef). Asians are rich enough, moreover, to pay a much higher price for food whenever prices spike due to temporary supply disruptions, as at the moment.


Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians and Yemenis are not. Episodes of privation and even hunger will become more common. The miserable economic performance of all the Arab states, chronicled in the United Nations' Arab Development Reports, has left a large number of Arabs so far behind that they cannot buffer their budget against food price fluctuations.

Earlier this year, after drought prompted Russia to ban wheat exports, Egypt's agriculture minister pledged to raise food production over the next ten years to 75% of consumption, against only 56% in 2009. Local yields are only 18 bushels per acre, compared to 30 to 60 for non-irrigated wheat in the United States, and up 100 bushels for irrigated land.

This suggests that American policy might be better served by putting more cropland into production, particularly here in the Central Valley, rather than taking it out of production as we have been doing.

Television is better than the Pill for reducing the population.

This Foreign Affairs article is sounding the alarm about the graying of the world's population. Here's an interesting observation:

Surprisingly, this graying of the world is not by any means the exclusive result of programs deliberately aimed at population control. For though there are countries such as India, which embraced population control even to the point of forced sterilization programs during the 1970s and saw dramatic reduction in birth rates, there are also counterexamples such as Brazil, where the government never promoted family planning and yet its birth rate went down even more. Why? In both countries and elsewhere, changing cultural norms appear to be the primary force driving down birth rates -- think TV, not government decrees. In Brazil, television was introduced sequentially province by province, and in each new region the boob tube reached, birth rates plummeted soon after. (Discuss among yourselves whether this was because of what's on Brazilian television -- mostly soap operas depicting rich people living the high life -- or simply because a television was now on at night in many more bedrooms.)

Then, there is this for the anti-natalists:

Then, however, the outlook turns bleak. Over time, low birth rates lead not only to fewer children, but also to fewer working-age people just as the percentage of dependent elders explodes. This means that as population aging runs its course, it might well go from stimulating the economy to depressing it. Fewer young adults means fewer people needing to purchase new homes, new furniture, and the like, as well as fewer people likely to take entrepreneurial risks. Aging workers become more interested in protecting existing jobs than in creating new businesses. Last-ditch efforts to prop up consumption and home values may result in more and more capital flowing into expanded consumer credit, creating financial bubbles that inevitably burst (sound familiar?).


In other words, a planet that grays indefinitely is clearly asking for trouble. But birth rates don't have to plummet forever. One path forward might be characterized as the Swedish road: It involves massive state intervention designed to smooth the tensions between work and family life to enable women to have more children without steep financial setbacks. But so far, countries that have followed this approach have achieved only very modest success. At the other extreme is what might be called the Taliban road: This would mean a return to "traditional values," in which women have few economic and social options beyond the role of motherhood. This mindset may well maintain high birth rates, but with consequences that today are unacceptable to all but the most rigid fundamentalists.

So is there a third way? Yes, though we aren't quite sure how to get there. The trick will be restoring what, in the days of family-owned farms and small businesses, was once true: that babies are an asset rather than a burden. Imagine a society in which parents get to keep more of the human capital they form by investing in their children. Imagine a society in which the family is no longer just a consumer unit, but a productive enterprise. The society that figures out how to restore the economic foundation of the family will own the future. The alternative is poor and gray indeed.