Les Jones

John Holdren, Obama’s science czar, advocated totalitarian measures to address overpopulation

Saturday, July 11th, 2009 | Environment, Population, Science | Permalink | 6 Comments |

Via Ace of Spades, Zombietime has unearthed a book of environmental extremism written by Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, and co-authors Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The book, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, advocates extreme measures such as forced abortions and forced sterilization to combat the threat the authors foresee from overpopulation.

All quotes directly from the book (and Zombietime has photographs of these passages if you have any doubts):

• Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
• One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.
• Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.
• If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection.
• In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?

In the 1970s overpopulation was the environmental boogeyman that would destroy us all. Now global warming has replaced overpopulation as the all-encompassing threat to our existence, with not just a hint that overpopulation is the real problem that will have to be controlled. Reading the quotes above you can’t help but be reminded of the shameful history of social Darwinism and eugenics.

The only country that followed this sort of advice was Communist China, which enforces its one child per couple policy with forced abortions. Disgusting as the proposals above are, they’re the tip of the iceberg. In order for a government to engage in forced abortions or forced sterilizations they would first have to eliminate most civil liberties, just as China has done. In the name of saving the planet our government would have to become as brutal and totalitarian as China’s.

P.S. Holdren was the loser of a famous bet involving the Earth’s resources and commodity prices.

Tags: democrats aren't the party of science either, john holdren

Retiree dependency ratio by country

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | Population, Social Security | Permalink | No Comments |

Financial Times - The red ink of a greyer future:

Once the recession passes, countries will need to work on closing their gaping fiscal deficits without triggering further collapses in output. They will also need to service bloated national debts. The International Monetary Fund estimates that among the Group of 20 nations whose leaders meet in London this week, the industrialised members will have increased their national debts by an average equivalent to nearly 25 per cent of gross domestic product between 2007 and 2014.

That is a heavy burden. But, to 2050, the cost of this crisis will be no more than 5 per cent of the financial impact they face from the ageing of their citizenry. As the IMF says, “in spite of the large fiscal costs of the crisis, the major threat to long-term fiscal solvency is still represented, at least in advanced countries, by unfavourable demographic trends”.

When I was younger and more enthusiastic about environmentalism I thought China’s one child policy was brilliant. Now I just think it’s suicidal, not to mention tyrannical.

Hat tip to Tigerhawk.

Responses to Jonathon Porritt’s polemic on limiting the number of children

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | Environment, Population | Permalink | 2 Comments |

From Ann Althouse:

“The Optimum Population Trust… says each baby born in Britain will… burn carbon roughly equivalent to 2½ acres of old-growth oak woodland….”

Why old-growth oak woodland? Why specify your absolute favorite form of vegetation in comparison to a completely generic baby? We’re just talking about carbon emissions over the course of a lifetime. Why not weigh one largish cornfield against the entire lifetime of love and service of somebody’s adorable grandma?

Porritt, a former chairman of the Green party, says the government must improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.

Yeah, why cure illnesses? Let them loose to off more people with carbon footprints. True, it’s not as good as abortion, where you avoid the entire life of an old-growth forest killer. But a couple of middle-age disease deaths is the equivalent of an abortion, and these things add up. Just think of the immense progress in population control we could get with a major flu epidemic or bold new plague.

And one more thing. Why are we supposed to care about carbon footprints? Because of global warming? But why do we care about global warming? Because it will hurt people. If we see people as the problem, then there’s nothing to care about anymore.

James Lilieks:

It hasn’t taken long, but it’s taken hold: children, to some, are not bundles of joys, but bundles of sticks whose inevitable combustion harms the planet. It doesn’t matter whether reducing the population might deprive the world of another Mozart or a scientist who can cure cancer; the latter would just mean people living longer and going more harm, and it’s an act of pure cultural arrogance and classism to suggest we need another Mozart anyway.

Yep. According to mainstream environmentalism we’re supposed to save the planet for the children. And what’s the biggest threat to the planet? The children.

We should save Mother Earth for the children. Which we shouldn’t have, because they’re bad for Mother Earth.

Thinking of children? Think of the children!

If you had loved Mother Earth you wouldn’t have been born.

This sort of environmentalist thinking taken to its logical conclusion is madness and makes a person hate humanity and themselves.

Ebenenezer Scrooge was a Malthusian

Saturday, December 27th, 2008 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

TCS Daily - Malthus And Scrooge:

“Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.” “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.” “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

That phrase–surplus population–is what first tipped me off to Dickens’ philosophical agenda. He’s taking aim at the father of the zero-growth philosophy, Thomas Malthus. Malthus’ ideas were still current in British intellectual life at the time A Christmas Carol was written. Malthus, himself, had joined the surplus generation only nine years before. But his ideas have proved more durable.

Malthus taught the world to fear new people. An amateur economist, he created a theoretical model which allegedly proved that mass starvation was an inevitable result of population growth. Populations grow, he said, geometrically, but wealth only grows arithmetically. In other words, new people create more new people, but new food doesn’t create new food.

Malthus’ influence, unfortunately, grew geometrically and not arithmetically. His ideas provided fodder for Darwin, and Darwin’s lesser mutations used the model to argue for the value of mass human extinction.

Hitler’s hard eugenics and Sanger’s (founder of Planned Parenthood) softer one, both owed a great debt of gratitude to Thomas Malthus. So do the zero-growth, sustainable-growth, right-to-die, duty-to-die, life boat bio-ethicists who dominate so much of our intellectual discussion. Malthus turned out to be, ironically, right in some sense. His prediction of mass death has taken place; not because he was right, but because he was believed.

There’s a petty, hateful philosophy that looks as at every newborn child as a a drain on the public coffers or a devower of the Earth’s resources. That philosophy is fundamentally Malthusian.

The apocalyptic effects of overpopulation threatened by Malthus and Paul Ehrlich never came to pass. Most developed countries are instead trying to avoid the harmful effects of de-population.

NY Times Notices Italy and Europe’s Depopulation Problem

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | Population | Permalink | 2 Comments |

The New York Times - No Babies?:

When Falivena took office in 2002 for his second stint as mayor, two numbers caught his attention. Four: that was how many babies were born in the town the year before. And five: the number of children enrolled in first grade at the school, never mind that the school served two additional communities as well. “I knew what was my first job, to try to save the school,” Falivena told me. “Because a village that does not have a school is a dead village.” He racked his brain and came up with a desperate idea: pay women to have babies. And not just a token amount, either; in 2003 Falivena let it be known he would pay 10,000 euros (about $15,000) for every woman — local or immigrant, married or single — who would give birth to and rear a child in the village. The “baby bonus,” as he calls it, is structured to root new citizens in the town: a mother gets 1,500 euros when her baby is born, then a 1,500-euro payment on each of the child’s first four birthdays and a final 2,500 euros the day the child enrolls in first grade. Falivena has a publicist’s instincts, and he said he hoped the plan would attract media attention. It did, generating news across Italy and as far away as Australia.

DEMOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”

To the uninitiated, “lowest low” seems a strange thing to worry about. A few decades ago we were getting “the population explosion” drilled into us. The invader species homo sapiens, we learned, was eating through the planet’s resources and irretrievably fouling and wrecking its fragile systems. Has the situation changed for the better since Paul Ehrlich set off the alarm in 1968 with his best seller “The Population Bomb”? Do current headlines — global food shortages, climate change — not indicate continuing signs of calamity?

They do, as far as some are concerned, but things have changed somewhat. For one thing, around the world, even in developing countries, birthrates have plummeted — from 6.0 globally in 1972 to 2.9 today — as populations have shifted from rural areas to cities and people have adopted urban lifestyles, and the drop has perhaps lessened the urgency of the overpopulation cry. Meanwhile, in recent years another chorus of voices has sounded. Yes, we’re straining resources, they say, and it’s undeniable that some parts of the globe are overrun with humanity. But other regions now confront a very different fate. In Europe, “lowest low” isn’t just a phenomenon of rural areas like Laviano. Cities like Milan and Bologna have recorded some of the lowest birthrates anywhere, in part because the high cost of living forces couples either to move or to have fewer children. After the term was invented, “lowest-low fertility” got the attention of leaders in Brussels and national capitals across the Continent — and by now everyone from Seville to Helsinki seems to be aware of it. In Greece, the problem is so well situated in the national psyche that it is conversationally compacted: people refer simply to “the demographic.” Putting the numbers in a broader world-historical context stirred a debate about Europe’s future. Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European.

Reading here and there in the article you can grasp how awful Europe’s generational suicide will be if it continues.

Japan’s Engineering Crunch

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 | Population | Permalink | 1 Comment |

The New York Times - High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers (emphasis mine):

The problem did not catch Japan by surprise. The first signs of declining interest among the young in science and engineering appeared almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living standards, and in recent years there has been a steady decline in the number of science and engineering students. But only now are Japanese companies starting to feel the real pinch.

By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers. Headhunters have begun poaching engineers midcareer with fat signing bonuses, a predatory practice once unheard-of in Japan’s less-cutthroat version of capitalism.

The problem is likely to worsen because Japan has one of the lowest birthrates in the world. “Japan is sitting on a demographic time bomb,” said Kazuhiro Asakawa, a professor of business at Keio University. “An explosion is going to take place. They see it coming, but no one is doing enough about it.”

The shortage is causing rising anxiety about Japan’s competitiveness. China turns out some 400,000 engineers every year, hoping to usurp Japan’s place one day as Asia’s greatest economic power.

WaPo Notices Japan’s Population Decline

Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

Washington Post - Japan Steadily Becoming a Land Of Few Children:

The economic and social consequences of these trends are difficult to overstate. Japan, now the world’s second-largest economy, will lose 70 percent of its workforce by 2050 and economic growth will slow to zero, according to a report this year by the nonprofit Japan Center for Economic Research.

Population shrinkage began three years ago and is gathering pace. Within 50 years, the population, now 127 million, will fall by a third, the government projects. Within a century, two-thirds of the population will be gone.

In what is now being called a “super-aging” society, department and grocery stores have recorded declining sales for a decade — and new car sales have fallen for 18 consecutive years.

Rural Japan, thus far, has borne the brunt of the slide. In depopulated small towns, stores are closing, governments are desperate for tax revenue and there are chronic shortages of doctors and nurses. The government is subsidizing the development of robots as caregivers for the old.

There’s always the hope that Japan’s government will change the policies that led to the baby bust, but it may not be pretty. People have fewer children because they depend more on government programs than the family, and because of the taxes required to fund the programs they have no choice but to have fewer children. Japan is likely to have to cut those government retirement and health programs or else the burden on the ever-shrinking working population will grow more burdensome. Else young people will realize they’re better off taking their college degrees and their passports to a country that doesn’t punish them for the poor decisions foisted on them by politicians who will have passed on by then. Either way, one generation or another is going to have to pay for those decisions.

Russia’s Population Decline Slowing

Friday, April 25th, 2008 | Population | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Strategypage - More babies, less oil:

Russia is reversing its population decline, which began before the Cold War ended, and accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Births were up 14 percent last year (to 1.6 million), over 2006. At its worst, a few years ago, the Russian population was declining 750,000 a year. A growing economy, more health consciousness and more pro-family laws have all contributed to this. Still, it will be another decade or two before the decline will halt. By then, the Russian population will be under 140 million. It went down 200,000 last year, to 142 million. At this rate, it would be under 100 million by 2050. That, however, is being reversed.

Russia has been headed towards extinction-level population loss. Contrary to the first sentence of the Strategypage article excerpted above, Russia’s population decline has not yet reversed. The population there is still in decline, but the decline is now at a somewhat slower rate and if the trend continues they’ll begin restoring some of their population.

“No Country for Young Men” - the Boomers Retire

Sunday, January 20th, 2008 | Population | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Megan McArdle looks at likely effects of baby boomer retirement that officially began last week:

At one point or another, you’ve probably heard the speculation that once the Boomers start selling their stocks and mutual funds to support their retirement, the flood of sales will cause the market to crash. That’s plain wrong: the Boomers were born over a period of 18 years, and they will retire over a similar span; moreover, most of them will not start cashing in their stocks immediately. Most people, evidence shows, wait to break into their 401(k)s until they have to. David Wise, the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s aging program, has, along with his colleagues, run multiple models looking at what will happen as the Boomers sell out, and he believes the effect will likely be modest.

But the outlook for equity markets is cloudy nonetheless. The problem is more basic: stock prices reflect both a company’s current earnings and its expected growth in earnings. A high price-to-earnings ratio means investors expect fast growth in future earnings. If you think economic growth is going to slow, the stock market looks overvalued today. Historically, stocks in aggregate have tended to trade at P/E ratios between 12 and 20. Right now, the P/Es of the three major indexes are on the high end of that range, implying the expectation of faster-than-usual economic growth. That sort of growth will be awfully difficult to achieve as the Boomers retire—and the problem could persist for decades. It is possible that, as the Yale economist Irving Fisher infamously said in 1929, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”

And on the difficulties and expense of transitioning parts of the economy from catering to the young to catering to the aged:

My grandmother, who is blind and physically frail, was able to live at home much longer than she otherwise could have because she had Meals on Wheels, a home health aide, and a Life Alert-type necklace to call for help in case she fell.

But these services require a lot of labor. According to an analysis by McKinsey Global Institute, the number of hours required to produce an automobile in North America fell by 1.7 percent annually from 1987 to 2002, to an average of about 100 hours. Meanwhile, it still takes about the same amount of time as it always did to drive a senior to a doctor’s appointment, or to help an older patient bathe and dress. Productivity growth is faster in the things that kids consume than in the things that the elderly need.

This is is yet another example of the problems described under the heading of Baumol’s cost disease:

Baumol’s cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. The original study was conducted for the performing arts sector. Baumol and Bowen pointed out that the same number of musicians are needed to play a Beethoven string quartet today as were needed in the 1800’s; that is, the productivity of Classical music performance has not increased.

In a range of businesses, such as the car manufacturing sector and the retail sector, workers are continually getting more productive due to technological innovations to their tools and equipment. In contrast, in some labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing, education, or the performing arts there is little or no growth in productivity over time. As with the string quartet example, it takes nurses the same amount of time to change a bandage, or college professors the same amount of time to mark an essay, in 2006 as it did in 1966.

Baumol’s cost disease is a fascinating topic that touches on many areas of economics and public policy. For instance, it’s a a likely influence on the fact that college tuition and health care costs tend to rise much faster than the general rate of inflation.

Tags: no country for old men

Steyn on Population Decline

Monday, October 22nd, 2007 | Population | Permalink | 2 Comments |

The Corner

John O’Sullivan and I occasionally discussed Montreal, and he observed that a big-city heritage without big-city overcrowding can be very pleasant: You’ve still got all the art galleries and symphony orchestras and so on. You’ve got tickets for Pavarotti at the Place des Arts. Curtain up, 7.30pm. So you leave at 7.20, park outside the front steps and stroll in. As John put it, societies in the early stages of decline can be very agreeable - and often more agreeable than societies trying to cope with prosperity and rapid growth.

Which brings me to my usual everything-comes-back-to-demography shtick. Precisely because the first stages of decline are so agreeable, it’s very hard to accept it as such. Part of the problem in Europe is that, when chaps like yours truly shriek “Run for your lives! The powder keg’s about to go up!”, etc, the bon vivant enjoying his Dubonnet at the sidewalk cafe thinks: Are you crazy? Life’s never been better. Civilized decline can be so charming you don’t notice it’s about to accelerate into uncivilized decline.

China Enforces One Child Policy, Birth Permits with Forced Abortions, Forced Sterilization

Thursday, September 6th, 2007 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

Have you ever heard someone say that people should have to have a license to become parents? Here’s what that looks like in reality.

Yang Zhongchen, a small-town businessman, wined and dined three government officials for permission to become a father.

But the Peking duck and liquor weren’t enough. One night, a couple of weeks before her date for giving birth, Yang’s wife was dragged from her bed in a north China town and taken to a clinic, where, she says, her baby was killed by injection while still inside her.

“Several people held me down, they ripped my clothes aside and the doctor pushed a large syringe into my stomach,” says Jin Yani, a shy, petite woman with a long ponytail. “It was very painful. … It was all very rough.”

• NPR: Cases of Forced Abortions Surface in China

• Fox News: Why Does NOW Support China’s Forced Abortion Policy?
• U.S House of Representatives: FORCED ABORTION AND STERILIZATION IN CHINA: THE VIEW FROM THE INSIDE
• BBC: Taiwan and China in abortion row
• Amnesty International: China Report 2005
• National Review: The Forgotten Women
• Capitalism Magazine: Pat Robertson Supports Forced Abortions in China, But Opposes Voluntary Abortions in America
• MSNBC: China victims decry forced late-term abortions
• Time: Why Forced Abortions Persist in China
• UK Independent: China admits women were forced to have abortions

Russia’s “Day of Conception”

Thursday, August 16th, 2007 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

AP:

A Russian region best known as the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin has found a novel way to fight the nation’s birthrate crisis: It has declared Sept. 12 the Day of Conception and for the third year running is giving couples time off from work to procreate.

The hope is for a brood of babies nine months later on Russia’s national day. Couples who “give birth to a patriot” during June 12 Russia Day festivities win money, cars, refrigerators and other prizes. Ulyanovsk, a region on the Volga River about 550 miles east of Moscow, has held similar contests since 2005. Since then, the number of competitors and the number of babies born to them have been on the rise.

[...]

Russia, with one-seventh of the Earth’s land surface, has 141.4 million citizens, making it one of the most sparsely settled countries in the world. With a low birthrate and a very high death rate, the population has been shrinking since the early 1990s. It is falling by almost half a percent each year. Demographic experts expect the decline to accelerate, estimating Russia’s population could fall below 100 million by 2050.

What Happens After Depopulation?

Friday, July 13th, 2007 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

Mark Steyn:

It’s hard to accept you have a demographic crisis in China, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands or Britain because by comparison with the US these are very crowded places, and the idea of losing, say, 20% of the population and freeing up a bit of space sounds very appealing. The difficulty is the bit you lose. In Europe (I happen to be in Spain at the moment), it’s very weird to go to a Mediterranean wedding with tons of aunts, uncles, gram’pas, gran’mas, but no kids, or to a German suburb built for families and to hear no children playing in the street. Yes, you’ll have more space, in the sense that a poor mill town has more space after the mill’s closed: the young folks have fled but at least ol’ Bud and Earl won’t have to wait for stools at the lunch counter, assuming it hasn’t gone out of business.

“A Continent of Losers”

Thursday, June 14th, 2007 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

An interview with German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn on global population changes:

“Look at the Polish people,” says Heinsohn — who was born in 1943 in the city now known as Gdansk, but which he still calls Danzig, the son of a German submarine captain who lost his life near Newfoundland five months before his son was born. “Here is a nation with proud traditions. Poland saved Europe from the Mongols, the Turks and the Bolsheviks and ended up bringing down Communism. And yet they have a lower birth rate than the Germans. They are down to 1.2 children per woman. In addition, over the last 15 years they have already lost 2 million of their best people. Perhaps emigrants tell their parents that they are coming back, but they won’t. That is why I am saying that countries such as Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are doomed. They have no attraction for immigrants. The same thing is happening with Russia. Who wants to move to Russia? And look at the newest members of the EU, Bulgaria and Romania. Romania is the first country in the world where there are more retirees than active workers, and we let them in. The same with Bulgaria, which has the world’s fastest-dwindling population. The young are moving out, and with a clean conscience, because they believe that tomorrow Brussels will pay for their parents. So the EU has accepted 27 million people who wanted to get inside to secure their pensions. And in the European centre they are still overjoyed to have attracted millions more than the USA. That will make us strong, they believe.”

When I was in college and for a long while after I believed that overpopulation was the worst problem. Back then I thought China’s one child policy was wonderful. Mark Steyn has criticized it as suicidal, and so does Heinsohn.

“China is the fastest ageing nation in the world after Germany, Japan and South Korea. We usually view China as a sleeping giant. I on the other hand see China as a source from where the Western nations will skim the best. And they will get them. Currently, rich Chinese are preoccupied with moving their riches to Switzerland because with the few children being born in China, people in their 40s have no chance of ever getting a pension. China is down to a fertility rate of 1.6 children per woman. The country is already losing 500 000 of its best every year. The young see no hope of ever being able to build a pension plan in their home country. Therefore they settle in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada etc.”

And what happens to real estate when the population drops?

“In East Germany they have just decided to demolish an additional 400 000 apartments. There are no people for them, and the empty apartments ruin the banks by depressing the rents and the prices of housing. In West Germany we are also losing population. We have to stop taking the least suitable immigrants. To attract young and competent people, we might give them a house. That was the way Brandenburg secured the French Huguenots in the 17th century. But I doubt it will work today.”

Via Kim du Toit.

“The Decline of Motherhood”

Saturday, May 12th, 2007 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

From Margret Kopala in the Ottawa Citizen:

For the generation that’s brought Canada’s fertility rate to below replacement levels, such idylls can only become increasingly rare. With 1.5 children per couple, our best hope is a quiet death in a clean facility where the immigrant workers speak our language. And that’s only the human face of demographic decline. The economic face is hardly more appealing: unfilled labour markets, reduced GDP and no tax revenues to pay for health care — to name a few.

Canada isn’t the only country in this predicament. According to America Alone, Mark Steyn’s self-described and penetrating rant on “demography, Islam and civilizational exhaustion,” the developed world has gone from 30 per cent to 20 per cent of global population. Greece has 1.3 births per couple — the “lowest low” from which no society has ever recovered; Russia, where 60 per cent of pregnancies are terminated, has the fastest-growing rate of HIV in the world and, by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles. In the developed world, only the United States, with a 2.1 birth rate, is replacing itself.

The future belongs to the cultures that are having children. All of the other cultures are committing generational suicide.

Record German Emigration

Thursday, August 31st, 2006 | European Union, Population | Permalink | No Comments |

From Bloomberg via Instapundit:

Koerber is one of 145,000 Germans who fled the fatherland last year amid record postwar unemployment, pushing emigration to its highest level since 1954, Federal Statistics Office figures show. Last year was also the first since the late 1960s that emigrants outnumbered Germans returning home from living abroad, the statistics office said.

Taking into account gross pay, taxes, insurance and the cost of living, doctors make more money in Switzerland, said Matthias Dettmer, 31, an assistant pathologist in Zurich from the southern German city of Tuebingen. He makes more than double his former colleagues in Germany, who earn what he calls a “cleaner’s pay.”

“I don’t know yet whether I’ll ever go back,” said Dettmer. “Under the prevailing conditions, it would be a hard sell to convince me that it’s better in Germany.” Koerber, who’s striving for permanent Canadian residency, said there’s little point trying to persuade him to return home. “I’ll never come back,” he said. “Guaranteed.”

Germany has one of the world’s lowest birthrates, ranking 223rd out of 225 countries. Adding emigration on top of that is going to devestate their culture and the tax base needed to sustain their social programs.

The Liberal Fertility Gap

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 | Population | Permalink | 5 Comments |

Arthur Brooks in the WSJ’s OpinionJournal:

Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They’re not having enough of them, they haven’t for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%–explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Alarmingly for the Democrats, the gap is widening at a bit more than half a percentage point per year, meaning that today’s problem is nothing compared to what the future will most likely hold. Consider future presidential elections in a swing state (like Ohio), and assume that the current patterns in fertility continue. A state that was split 50-50 between left and right in 2004 will tilt right by 2012, 54% to 46%. By 2020, it will be certifiably right-wing, 59% to 41%. A state that is currently 55-45 in favor of liberals (like California) will be 54-46 in favor of conservatives by 2020–and all for no other reason than babies.

The fertility gap doesn’t budge when we correct for factors like age, income, education, sex, race–or even religion. Indeed, if a conservative and a liberal are identical in all these ways, the liberal will still be 19 percentage points more likely to be childless than the conservative.

On a related note: “John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birth rates; George W Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.”

Sweden’s Suicide Note?

Thursday, July 20th, 2006 | European Union, Population | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Reflecting Light:

Fjordman at Gates of Vienna says he has confirmed from independent sources that Jens Orback, Democracy Minister (!) in the Swedish government, said during a radio debate: “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.”

In other words, a government minister takes it as foreordained that Swedes will become a minority in Sweden, and Muslims the majority. To him, it’s just a fact of life. It’s not as if the indigenous population could do anything about it, or should want to do anything about it.

Orback pins his hope on a Muslim majority being open and tolerant, just like they are in … in … help him out here.

It’s one more ominous confirmation that much of “old Europe” is sick unto death. It doesn’t want to preserve its national identities, its ethnic majorities, its traditional cultures, its system of government (except for the welfare state). God is dead; tolerance is God. If Sweden is to become part of Dar Al-Islam, well, who are Swedes to say that their way of life is better? It might cause offense.

Better to simply write the suicide note and make sure that the beneficiary is clearly spelled out in the will.

How Can Housing Demand Increase as Population Shrinks?

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 | Economics, Population | Permalink | No Comments |

Jane Galt and Winterspeak speculate on reasons why the demand for housing in MA and Boston can increase while the population decreases. An earlier study found the same thing happened in metro New York. That study found that the population loss was mostly due to middle class flight. Presumably the larger middle class families were being replaced with smaller upper class families or older, empty nest families.

Glenn Reynolds Article on the Decline of Families

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 | Population, Quotes | Permalink | No Comments |

Great article on the reasons for the decline in families, and the diminishing financial and social rewards of parenting. I loved this bit about the minivan.

People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan’s close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn’t prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.

Putin Offers Money for Russian Families to Have Babies

Thursday, May 11th, 2006 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

From WaPo:

President Vladimir Putin offered couples cash to have more children to halt a dramatic decline in population and called for a stronger army in a key speech on Wednesday in which he shrugged off sharp attacks by Washington.

Putin, defying predictions he would focus on foreign policy, zeroed in on Russia’s dwindling population — an issue with huge implications for the economy — which is falling by 700,000 people every year.

More on Domestic Migration Trends

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 | Population | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Willisms graphs the data from the Census Bureau study from last week. Summary: blue states losing population, red states gaining population.

Exodus from Large Cities, CA, IL, MA, NY

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

A new census report shows population losses in most large urban areas, and overall losses for California and most Northeastern states. The people fleeing those areas are of all ethnic makeups, leading some people to say this isn’t white flight but middle class flight.

The states gaining population are mostly in the South in the non-coastal Western states. The large cities that gained were Riverside, CA, Phoenix, AZ, Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL, Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth.

Those same emigrants are also moving to states with fewer gun control laws, as Uncle notes, but as his commentors suggest I think that’s a coincidence. The states that are more economically free also happen to have more second amendment freedom.

Tags: california

Chinese Labor Becoming More Expensive

Thursday, April 20th, 2006 | Economics, Population | Permalink | No Comments |

From the NY Times via New Editor:

Experts say the shortages are arising primarily because China’s economy is sizzling hot, tax cuts have helped keep people working on farms, and factories are continuing to expand even as the number of young Chinese starts to level off.

Prosperity is also moving inland, and workers who might earlier have migrated elsewhere are staying closer to home.

As the New Editor points out, the Times seems blasé that tax decreases can stimulate other country’s economies.

Germany Considers Pension Cuts for the Childless

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

Politicians Discuss Pension Cuts for Childless Germans:

New statistics confirming the declining birth rate have sent Germany in to a state of panic, amid a growing consensus that pensions should be increased for people with children and reduced for those without.

“People without children should either receive a reduced pension or pay more into pension schemes,” said Norbert Geis from the CSU.

Johann Eekhoff, director of the Cologne institute for Economic Policy said a reform of the pension system was long overdue.

“People without children should never have been admitted into pension schemes because these only work when they are financed by subsequent generations,” he said in an interview with mass-circulation Bild newspaper. “Their pensions should be cut by 50 percent.”

As Mark Steyn likes to say, any country that promotes a central welfare state is going to have to have pro-natalist policies, or the welfare state won’t survive more than a couple generations. The catch is that the welfare state seems strongly correlated with lower birth rates, potentially creating an unsustainable system. What’s a socialist to do?

To quote another Steynism, “The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism.”