Kentucky State University Prof. Wilfred Reilly:
A strange and striking thing is going on right now: Virtually the entire developed world appears to be quietly committing suicide. According to the 2021 edition of the CIA’s World Factbook, virtually every well-off European or East Asian country currently has a lifetime kids-per-couple birth rate below the 2.1 that is universally considered to be “replacement level.”
Taiwan (1.09), South Korea (1.11), Singapore (1.17), Hong Kong (1.23), Italy (1.24), Spain (1.29), Bosnia (1.37), Japan (1.39), Greece (1.4), and Poland (1.41) currently bring up the global rear, while Canada sits at 1.57 and the USA at a slightly better 1.84. Only 92 nations out of 223 currently have above-replacement fertility. Exactly one of them (Israel at 2.54) is a Western country, while two — Laos and Cambodia, a bit further down the rankings — are East or Southeast Asian.
Within the United States, both birth-rate stagnation and youth-population decline can be measured quite precisely at the state-to-state level. After the U.S. Census Bureau recently did this, a striking graphic trended on Twitter and Facebook under the header “Where Have All the Children Gone?” The attached image illustrates that, in significantly less than a decade, the population of American children aged 0–4 declined in no fewer than 45 of our 50 states, and grew in just five: Idaho, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
All of this seems likely to get worse (at least from the perspective of those who like babies) rather than better, across the middle-distance future. According to the most recent official OECD figures, which track quite well with those for the USA, the average age for first marriage is 31 years of age for women and 33 for men. In contrast, as I recently pointed out in a “controversial” online thread which drew both passionate condemnation and praise, the peak point for human fertility appears to be about age 23. For a variety of reasons — no doubt including simple disinterest among harried junior executives — Americans who have not yet had children by age 30 are only about 50 percent likely ever to do so.
Well, I guess we beat the odds.
And, importantly, the younger generations arising behind the often-mocked Millennials — which are frequently praised for being “based” and rejecting the work-focused materialism of their parents — are empirically even less likely to jump right into family life after college or law school. As I noted in a recent article for NR, many members of Gen-Z (“Men Going Their Own Way,” for example) seem to reject conventional dating and romance totally. Today, only 30 percent of senior high-school students have ever had sex even once, and only 21 percent are currently involved in a “sexually active” love relationship. About 20 percent identify as gay or otherwise “queer.”
There are several possible reasons for the objectively rather-astonishing rise of childless celibacy as a trend among America’s young. Religiosity, which brought with it endless “moral” rules but also the formal duty to “be fruitful and multiply,” is on the wane — the fastest-growing religious identity in the United States if not the world is “none.” Absurdly prolonged adolescence, including the relationship “talking stages” and “kissing stages” we all remember from middle school, now seems to be the norm for many young(ish) people: A proviso of the Obamacare health-care law allowed adults to remain dependent on their parents’ insurance until the age of 26. Birth-control pills and devices (as well as abortions) are widely available, with what some might call disturbing ease: A new hormonal pill was just approved for wholly over-the-counter sales.
But, one additional and very obvious factor has received far too little attention in most past analyses of this topic. Almost certainly, one reason that many Americans — perhaps particularly urban liberal white women — are not having children is that they have been told throughout their entire lives that it is immoral or evil to do so. The extent to which this is the case almost cannot be overstated.
Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which predicted near-future doom for entire countries such as India, came out in 1968, and “overpopulation” has been described by leftist thinkers as an existential threat to the planet during almost every year since. A simple cookies-off Google search for the phrase “overpopulation greatest threat” turns up 1,110,000 results, with the Population Matters activist group, the United Nations, the Scotsman, Arab News, and a well-maintained multi-page Wikipedia entry all making the first page . . . in appropriately terrified form. A great deal of empirical evidence indicates that this sort of thing has a real impact: A recent large-N survey found that fear of such variables as “climate change” influenced the child-bearing decisions of 53 percent of respondents.
In reality, of course, Ehrlich turned out to be almost literally 100 percent wrong — a famously incorrect, unnecessarily panicked, elite bleater. India is with us still, and all of the slightly more realistic predictions in his book were countered by predictable technological advances like the Green Revolution in agriculture. Indeed, a cynic might note that the same thing has happened to every other doomsday prediction to come out of the left-leaning modern academy and its acolytes: Y2K, Peak Oils 1–5 (?), the nonsense and flapperdoodle from the Club of Rome, “killer bees” and the Great Northerly Migration, Global Cooling, the Coming Western Heterosexual AIDS Epidemic, the Hammer and the Dance Covid models, etc.
In my occasionally humble opinion, much the same thing will happen with global climate change today. A group of wonderfully practical state university scientists recently pointed out that simply painting home and business roofs with a novel variety of light-colored refractive paint (as well as planting more trees) would mitigate most of the heat-sink effects of GCC that we currently fear. Once again, one strongly suspects, the people occupying Western civilization will figure out a solution to a problem like “higher sea levels” — rather than simply staring dully at the rising waters until we all drown.
However, we may not as easily survive the downstream effects of our current fear of the rising waters. One of the more notable realities on display in that CIA Factbook is that many of the USA’s down-road rivals have not begun to existentially panic and abandon reproduction. Nigeria’s total fertility rate (TFR) is currently 4.57 per couple. Ghana’s is 3.61.
Pakistan — a nuclear-armed Muslim state far outside of Africa — hits the line at 3.39. Iraq’s TFR is 3.17, the Philippines’ 2.77, Egypt’s 2.76, South Africa’s 2.17, Argentina’s the same, and so on. Even now-stable India, with her 1.4 billion citizens, sits at replacement level: almost exactly 2.10 children per two Indians, with these children concentrated among the middle classes. And our future direct competitors within these states are hardly shoeless despoblado laborers: During typical recent years, Indian migrants to the USA were already our wealthiest group, and Nigerian immigrants our best-educated.
Can the United States continue to lead the world? Sure. We and the rest of the West continue to enjoy the massive structural advantages over, say, Nigeria — advantages that brought all of those people here in the first place. But, to keep growing our population and retain our economic pole position while we do so, we will have to try something that we have not tried for decades — convincing our own citizens that having families is good.
Suggestions on how to do that are welcome!
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 