Normally, I’d post this over at Outside the Beltway but it’s sufficiently general and discursive that I thought I’d leave it over here. It really never ceases to amaze me how truly we are living in the wreckage of the Great War, World War I. You might get the impression from reading Mark Steyn’s column today on the decline of Europe:
How fair thou hast been—but only for the moment, and the moment is passing. Europe’s economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis: what is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-national, post-modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can’t make the math add up.
that Europe’s self-imposed retrenchment is a recent phenomenon or goes back only as far as World War II. That isn’t the case. Continental Europe did not arm itself to fend off the threat posed by the rise of the Third Reich in Germany. And they didn’t repel the Hun once Germany had invaded and occupied them. They relied on the Anglosphere for that—Britain, the United States, and Canada. Hitler was more a product of the rejection of Europe’s cultural values than the cause of that rejection.
Nor did Europe re-arm itself to keep the Russians from their doorstep. Once again, they relied on the Anglosphere for that.
Europe continues to grow economically and prosper. It’s not growing as fast as the Far East or even (until the recent downturn) the United States. But it’s still growing. There is little doubt that Europe’s ethnically-based countries will experience substantial stress over the course of this century as they come to terms (if they come to terms) with the foreigners that will comprise an increasing proportion of their populations.
And let’s not forget the other Central Power. The Turks are now beginning to re-assert their influence in the lands they once ruled in the Middle East. That’s how I would interpret the flotilla, the Turkish reaction to the boarding of one its ships by member of the IDF, and the deaths of nine of the provocateurs on board: Turkey is re-asserting its influence.
I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Unless the Arabs can unite themselves, something that’s been denied them or eluded them for a millenium, Turkey with its 77 million people and ties with the West is the only viable balance to Iran in the region. Iran’s and Turkey’s interests will never coincide enough for them to make common cause against the West for any period of time. There’s only room for one regional superpower in the Middle East and Iran has its cap set for the job.
Unfortunately Steyn starts from facts — declining birth rate — and leaps from there to his familiar axe-grinding.
There is not the slightest evidence that socialism is responsible for low birth rates. There is plenty of reason to associate low birth rates with wealth. Unless Steyn is saying that socialism creates wealth he’s missing a few dots in connecting events. (In fact in Russia the disappearance of the socialist state has been followed by the most drastic and sudden decline in both birth rate and longevity.)
Birth rates drop wherever people become well off. Birth rates drop because:
1) The technology (the pill etc…) exists to allow couples to turn what had been to some degree involuntary into a purely volitional act.
2) There is no economic incentive to have large numbers of children in an advanced, industrialized economy. Has nothing to do with welfare states, it has to do with the fact that we don’t need children to work the farm or take over the smithy.
3) There are all sorts of economic disincentives to having children. They’re expensive. They take up a lot of time.
Families had more children when having more children made economic sense. When it stopped making sense they stopped having more children. And it’s a worldwide phenomenon. Even in South America and Africa increases in prosperity and the realities of a more developed economy, combined with the technology, yield fewer kids.
There is no political solution to this. It seems likely that world population will peak some time in the next few decades and then begin to decline. So Europe (and Japan and the US) are just the leading edge. What we should be doing is figuring out how to adapt, not mourning the old birth rate-fueled past.
We could start by realizing that 60 is the new 50 and move past the notion of retirement. So long as people can be productive, they should be productive. The whole idea that healthy, capable people should spend 20 years puttering in the garden is an anachronism.
I think I agree with about 90% of what you said in that comment, Michael, and you put my discomfort with Steyn’s column more succinctly than I did.
I think that you discount children as a form of social insurance a little to much. I think that as government-supplied social insurance increases the incentive to have children declines and, as you note, the costs are substantial.
I agree that Russia is a great example but I think that it exemplifies so many things it’s hard to disambiguate them. Why does Russia have a low birthrate? Reasons include extremely high rates of hypertension in men (60%), environmental factors, widespread alcoholism, high rates of stillborn and low birth weight, high rates of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases,low quality healthcare, and the use of abortion as a primary method of birth control creating reproductive problems for women. Basically, the legacy of the Soviet system.
However, adverse views of prospects for the future unquestionably play a role, too.
Russia’s healthcare system is a Bismark-style system, somewhat similar to Germany’s. It suffers from the problems you might expect in a country that spreads over as many timezones with as small a population as the country outside of Russia proper has.
You’re right, I did overlook the old-age insurance aspect of children.
I would love to see someone run the numbers on an investment in children — many, many tens of thousands of dollars — versus the same amount invested in an IRA. My intuition is that we’d be better off economically buying bonds than buying private schools, college degrees, orthodontia, glasses, toys, clothing, camps, etc….
One other point on kids as social insurance: although our kids no doubt love us, they too are bound by economic realities. Children cared for parents when a parent was the source of income — owned the farm, owned a shop, etc… As a purely economic question, what would the incentive be for children to support aging parents?
I really hate the “children are expensive” argument. It isn;t that children are “too expensive” to have but that many people prefer material goods or the material “good life” to having children. And, I suppose, in a sense its true. If you have four children you probably wont have that 55 inch “Quattro” television, or the $50,000 Audi with the leather interior. You certainly will not be retiring in your 50’s either.
I’m sorry but I just don’t buy the economic determinist argument that wealth causes decline in birthrates. Declining birthrates are much more easily explained by noting that, as a civilization, we have begun to value our material comfort more highly than we value family/children. Look at the Mormons. Their religion places a value on family which is viewed as “odd” by many non-Mormons. After all, they must be impoverishing themselves because they have more children on average than anyopne else in America, right?
Well, wrong. It seems – http://www.columnfivemedia.com/infographic-for-good-the-almighty-dollar/?display=wide – that whereas 31% of all Americans have median incomes of above $75,000 a year, so does 32% of Mormons. 48% of Americans make $50,000 a year or more, while 54% of Mormons make $50,000 a year or more. So Mormons are wealthier than average Americans but still have more children. This proves that “economic determinism” isn’t determinitive.
So this isn’t a question of Europeans being cursed by their good ecomonic fortune. The values they are living their lives by are of their own choosing. If they want to value Ipads higher than children, so be it. And if their future looks bleak, well, they will have nothing to blame but their poor moral choices.
Rich:
It’s a distinction without a difference.
If children are expensive (and they are) and they add only emotional value to a family (and that’s the reality,) and people can choose whether or not to have kids, (and they can) then whether they choose to spend the savings of a smaller family on an Audi (interesting choice, since I happen to drive one) or an iPad is beside the point. People are largely motivated by profit, by benefits to themselves. Isn’t that the basic principal behind the free market?
The question is why would people choose to have 5 kids rather than an Audi? (The Mormons are a small sect heavily concentrated in a rural area. You can’t really generalize from them to the other billion or so people in the developed world.) As it happens, I have two kids and the Audi. So what would conceivably impel me to add three more kids?
That’s the crux of the problem. It’s not about values. It’s about the fact that I get all the emotional charge I need from two kids, and there exists no particular incentive for me to have 3 or 3 or 10 more.
Consider as well that adding children doesn’t just cut into my Audi time, it limits the attention and resources devoted to the two kids I do have. Can I afford to pay for college for 10 kids? Does it make sense to have 10 poorly-educated kids as opposed to 2 pampered ones? If my wife can’t work because she’s having children perpetually it won’t be a matter of trading my Audi for a Honda, it will be a question of feeding and providing health care to 10 children.
I think you’re looking for a moral or values or religious answer when what we have is an economic one.
I think michael’s generally correct that the large changes in birthrate are related to increased wealth (contraception, female literacy, diminishment of traditional taboos). But birthrates also diminish without increases in wealth where members of society feel alienated or doubtful about their future.
The birth rate in Germany dropped off sharply after WWI, generally ascribed to economic hardship and pessimism about the future. Most of the pessimism came from losing a war that seemed unlosable, but a lot of cracks opened up, including the financial viability of the Bismark healthcare system. Even before the NAZIS arose, it became a broad middle class concern that there were not enough children being born to maintain the welfare net and that the healthcare benefits were being unjustly gobbled up by undesirables and unworthees.
By the way, on Mormons: http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/daily/social_eom.htm
They have higher birth rate. But have experienced substantial declines. Why? Because of a change in beliefs? No, because of economic realities. And because they are concentrated in the mountain west they face far fewer economic disincentives than a family in New York or Barcelona. Compare the costs of adding two bedrooms to a Salt Lake City house to the costs of adding that much square footage in a major city. You cannot have an apartment big enough to house a large family in a major city unless you’re wealthy.
Dave, I’ve been thinking about your suggestion that Turkey is signalling its desire to be a regional power. That would seem to depend on Turkey making at least two conclusions:
1. Russia is no longer considered a primary threat, or alternatively that the U.S. is no longer considered to be capable/willing to protect Turkey. I believe Turkey’s key external threat for the last 100 years or so has been Russia, and the close relationship with the U.S. is the key response. Seeking hegemonic status in an area which is a vital security interest to the U.S. is knowlingly risking conflict with the U.S.
2. Turkey’s future is to the East, not the West. Is EU joinder possible or even desirable any more? Eastern entanglements certainly would not help. And again waning U.S. influence on European acceptance would be a factor.
I believe though that the shifts are not that great, and that this is simply further evidence of Islamization of Turkey.
I think that Turkey’s turn away from secularism, its turn towards the East, and its reassertion of its place in the Middle East are all mutually reinforcing. Turkey tried casting its fate with Europe and Europe wouldn’t have it. It was already clear that Turkey’s bid to enter the EU would be rejected.
Assuming increasing prosperity in Turkey and nationalism what other options does Turkey have to increase its power and influence? Note, too, Turkey’s recent role in negotiations with Iran.
BTW on this:
try 300 years.
Oh I think very clearly Mormons have slightly different values then they had in the 19th century. It is one thing to be a sect committed to unorthodox beliefs in the face of fierce opposition from the rest of society, but once the “accomodationist” turn is made you are dealing with a different animal.
Basically what we have here is a correlation vs. causation problem. Western civilization has gotten wealthier over the last 200 years, and has also experienced a declining birth rate. I just believe inserting a “and as a result” into the above sentence is simply too presumptuous by far, because over the intervening 200 years the Western world has also become increasingly more secular and consumed by the ideological mass movements . Your argument is, basically, that ONLY economic factors matter and in that argument there is little distinction to be made between the devoted Marxist or the firm believer in laissez-faire capitalism. (The Marxist would be a bit more of a straight determinist, but I’d argue that the “rational actor” model of liberal economics is pretty determinist in its own way.)
“Does it make sense to have 10 poorly-educated kids as opposed to 2 pampered ones?”
This is a strawman. The question is not will anyone have 2 or 10 kids. (Only the Octomom makes that leap at one go.) Answer truthfully, did you and your wife not have a third child because you said “I’d (we’d) like to have a third child, but we cannot afford it,” or was the thinking more like “I am (we are) happy with two children. I (we) don’t want any more.”? I’m thinking, for most people, it would be some variation of the latter rather than the former. And while it is true that economic concerns could make up a component of the latter evaluation, it logically could include many other factors of a non-economic variety. I must say I found your view that only egotistical concerns matter (e.g. parents seeking “emotional charges” from their children) a little depressing. Are you an economics prefessor? (If so that would explain much.)
But that is just me, the philosophy professor, speaking. 😉
This is wrong. The French quite obviously did arm themselves, considering the Maginot Line. They just made a major strategic mistake, and chose to surrender rather than tear up Paris and France in general.
Are you referring to them wanting to but being unable to repel them, or collaboration? Both were present in continental Europe, with collaborationist regimes prominent in southeast Europe.
The Soviet Union was a far more prominent factor in the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing the shock of the German onslaught before driving west.
Dave, they did re-arm, to the best of their abilities (it’s not easy to do so when your country was just the battleground). France re-armed, fought an insurgency in Algeria and in Vietnam, and even built a nuclear deterrent. West and East Germany re-armed, although both were limited in how far they could take it by their superpower clients. Spain was neutral the whole war.
Maybe in a very general sense, but it has much more to do with the fact that several of their nationals were killed by the IDF (and Israel isn’t popular among much of Turkey), the unpopularity of Israel’s stranglehold on Gaza, and the fact that the Turkish government (and Erdogan in particular) feel like Israel has been spitting in their face in exchange for what they’ve been helping Israel with.
Your belief is contradicted by the fact that birth-rates in almost all of the industrialized countries have either dropped significantly or stabilized as they have gotten wealthier, and as they have moved away from economies with a major percentage of their GDP in agriculture.
As for why, while desire for “material comfort” is part of it, it’s also an investment strategy. When 1 in 3 children in America died before the age of 5, it made sense to have tons of children, since you always ran a chance of losing some of them to disease, accidents, and the like. But with childhood mortality having dropped enormously, it makes better sense to have fewer children while investing more resources into them.
How much more children? Less than 1 in 4 Mormans have 3 or more children at home, and while that’s higher than most other sects, it’s not so high as to counteract the general trend towards declining birth rates (and Mormon birth rates have fallen drastically over the years).
Not really. All it proves is that a strong religious push for families results in – maybe – a slightly higher amount of children at a certain income level. Nobody ever said that rise in incomes was the only effect on birth levels, but it is by and far the biggest one (and like I and Michael said earlier, Mormon birth rates have dropped over the years as income rose as well).
The only problem with that is that we’ve seen the pattern in virtually every industrialized nation occur, regardless of religious status or nationality. It has happened in Japan, Russia, the UK, America, and Italy, is happening in Mexico and China, and the like. That makes me skeptical of the claim that it was due to increasing secularism or mass movements, particularly since you don’t have a clear causative agent to explain the connection in the way that you have one with the income – birth-rate connection.
To add –
Here’s the link to the Pew Survey I cited on number of children: link
Dave, I think the natural focus of Turkey’s regional/hegemonic ambitions is to its geographic East in Central Asia. That was actually Turkey’s view when it formed just after the Great War, but Soviet expansion limited them.
I think to the immediate South, in the Shiite Crescent, Turkey has some significant handicaps, such as ethnic, religious and water conflicts. And as you suggest, Iran and Turkey are probably natural rivals. Turkey’s turn against Israel will probably pay bigger dividends in the far South of the Arab world, in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and North Africa.
Turkey’s pro-American/pro-Israel policy was top-down elitist. I would add “democratizing” to your list of factors that are changing Turkish foreign policy. The foreign policy increasingly has to engage the values of the Turk in the street.
Rich:
For your analysis to be true you’d have to believe that for reasons not explained the populations of all of Europe — including countries as diverse as Italy and Sweden — Japan, much of South America and North America had sudden philosophical conversions to a different world view. A world view somehow separate from the quantifiable changes in their economic status.
You have within that mix countries that are Catholic, protestant and Confuscian; countries with a history of large families and small; countries with a wide variety of governments; countries with wildly different histories. I submit that sort of mass intellectual conversion is a less likely explanation than the obvious one: they all got rich.
As for my situation, I never said I stopped at two kids because I couldn’t afford more. I’ll repeat my points: 1) We have control of reproduction, 2) We have no economic incentive to have large families and 3) we have serious disincentives to having large families.
I don’t if someone has mentioned this, but a great deal of child rearing is subsidized at least for those on the lower half of the income distribution. Public schools, health care, and so forth. So if anything this is a negative effect against Steyn’s hypothesis.
They are all economic if they deal with scarce resources such as time for example. Maybe people want 2 vs. 3 not because of the cost of clothing, feeding, education, etc. but because they’d have less leisure time, for example. Many people make the mistake that economics means money, but in reality economics deals with how people allocate scarce resources. The market is one method of doing so and under the right conditions does so better than just about anything else out there, if your primary measure is efficiency.
Michael you better strangle your inner-economist before you write more stuff like this, people will start to get the wrong idea. :p
Hah. My inner economist is sadly stuck at about 6th grade math, so he’s not too formidable.
“That makes me skeptical of the claim that it was due to increasing secularism or mass movements, particularly since you don’t have a clear causative agent to explain the connection in the way that you have one with the income – birth-rate connection.”
As opposed to what exactly? This is the basic argument we are being given:
A) Having children is expensive
B) People are wealthier today than they have ever been:
THEREFORE: C) People have fewer children.
Now, this argument has never struck me as being terribly persuasive as condition B should have made condition A less of a factor.
Besides, just enter the following data into an spreadsheet, get a scatter plot of it, and tell ME if you think it looks like it confirms that Wealth CAUSES Declining Birthrate:
Albania 6300 2
Ireland 42200 1.85
UK 35200 1.66
France 32800 1.97
Poland 17900 1.29
Bulgaria 12600 1.41
Portugal 21800 1.5
Latvia 14500 1.31
Czech Rep 25100 1.25
Belarus 11600 1.25
Italy 30300 1.32
Sweden 36800 1.67
Norway 58600 1.77
Germany 34100 1.42
Romania 11500 1.4
(All from CIA Factbook – #’s are Per Capita GDP and Birth Rate)
“It has happened in Japan, Russia, the UK, America, and Italy, is happening in Mexico and China, and the like…”
“For your analysis to be true you’d have to believe that for reasons not explained the populations of all of Europe — including countries as diverse as Italy and Sweden — Japan…”
Alright guys, which of the places you have mentioned are MORE secular then they were 100 years ago? Or 50 years ago? How many of them are culturally pretty much the same as they were 100 years ago? There are lots of way countries have changed, not just economics.
If it was only about economics how could we explain that Bulgaria has a birth rate roughly equivalent to Germany and Austria while having a per cepita GDP only roughly 1/3 as much? Or all the other Eastern European countries who have the lowest birthrates in Europe while being considerably poorer. In strictly economic terms it is inexplicable – but by looking at ideology and rates of secularism I have a much easier time of it. The Czech Republic has one of the lowest birthrates in the world while not being one of the Top 50 wealthiest countries in the world. I find it hard to believe the fact that nearly 70% of Czech’s profess no religion isn’t a big reason why.
Track individual countries as they grow in wealth. Better measure.
Steve
So the question you all are discussing seems to be whether wealth is the cause of low birth rates or is simply correlated with low birth rates.
I vote for the latter. I think the biggest factor is cultural, specifically the empowerment of women.
“Track individual countries as they grow in wealth. Better measure.”
Only if other things “remain equal” which, of course, they do not. The assumption is still being made that wealth acts as an independant variable determining the dependant variable birth rate.
The reason wealth is used so much is in part because it is far easier to supply the numbers for it. It becomes a much thornier issue to quantify the depth of religious/cultural feeling, the affect of political ideologies, the increase in “women’s rights/empowerment” etc., but “easier to produce” does not equal “better.” It certainly doesn’t equal “causation.”
Oh and Brett, I do agree with you about France in the inter-war period. Ernest May in his book “Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France” makes a pretty convincing argument that, materially speaking, the Allies should have been more than a match for Germany but they were undone by a lousy plan of battle. John Mosier in his “Myth of Blitzkreig” argues something similar, though for him it was their weddedness to military doctrines that were simply wrong that did them in.
Actually, what I’ve been saying is that 1) we can now control reproduction, 2) there is no economic incentive to have a large family, and 3) there are definite disincentives to having a large family.
I did carelessly say “they got rich,” but what I meant by that was that first world countries have 1-3 above. I didn’t mean to imply that getting rich caused smaller families, just that, again, in the modern world, in developed nations, 1 through 3 apply.
In a subsistence farming economy with high infant mortality and labor-intensive farming it presumably makes sense to have large families. So people do. But it doesn’t make sense in this world. So people don’t.
Why in God’s name would anyone have a large family? Why would anyone want to send 5 or 10 kids to college? Why would anyone want to pay for that large a house? It makes no sense. If you pray to the Virgin Mary and think birth control is wrong it still makes no economic sense. If you pray to Vishnu it still makes no sense. Pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and guess what? It still makes no sense to have a large family.
Blaming secularism is beside the point: better-developed, better-educated countries are more likely to be more secular. You might just as well draw a connection between dental care and small families, or shampoo use and small families, or obesity and small families.
Economic realities have changed. Period. Even for your example of the Mormons. It’s not about religion or secularism, it’s about simple facts of life. It’s about money: it usually is.
No, the basic argument is
1. We would like to have children.
2. Increasing wealth and medicine quality means that our children will likely survive to adulthood.
3. Investments in children are beneficial
Therefore,
1. We should have fewer children, but put more money into those children.
Stop with this Strawman Argument, Rich. Neither of us said that it was only economics that affected this trend, but that economics was the most important factor, and one which acted across cultural, religious, and political boundaries.
Brett, you are still ASSUMING what you want to “prove”. In a causation vs. correlation problem it is incumbent upon the person MAKING THE CLAIM to PROOVE it. You dont just get to assume it.
And who ISN’T saying it is all about economics? When Michael argues:
“Why in God’s name would anyone have a large family? Why would anyone want to send 5 or 10 kids to college? Why would anyone want to pay for that large a house? It makes no sense. If you pray to the Virgin Mary and think birth control is wrong it still makes no economic sense. If you pray to Vishnu it still makes no sense. Pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster and guess what? It still makes no sense to have a large family.”
…every argument above is an economics argument. “Sense” or rationality is being equated with some version of optimization of economic resources. I’m sorry, but that is the same thing as making it all about economics when you claim any other consideration “doesn’t make sense.” By what standard? Seemingly, the only “standard” being allowed by Michael is the economic one.
And Brett, you are doing the same thing. Look at your proposed syllogism. #2 and #3 in your argument are economical, as is your conclusion. The argument is entirely predicated on economic concerns. The very terms you use make the parent/child relationship a fiduciary one. Children are now a class of thing to be “invested” in, but not too much because they dont offer a great rate of return!
Raising children certainly can be expensive, but you start to get economies of scale after the first two if a parent or other family member is at home taking care of the kids. In the US and Europe, where women more frequently work outside the home than in other places, and where there often isn’t an extended family structure living in close proximity, then kids do indeed become very expensive. To put my three kids in childcare, for example, would easily be $30k (~$10k a child) a year and I currently live in the mid-west. But if me or my wife (or another family member) is at home, then additional children do not add a huge economic burden. But working at home is considered low-status and many people I know put their kids in daycare so both of them can work even though it often doesn’t make economic sense.
So in my opinion, it’s not just wealth (wealth does allow people to pay to outsource their child care) – it’s women having control over their own reproduction plus the cultural factors outlined above.
Actually, Rich was on the right track. I’m not sure why he did not include a bunch of Muslim countries, which go completely against the wealth as birthrate predictor. There is much more going on than economics. Economics might be a second or third order factor.
And it is this Muslim issue that Steyn, correctly, observes.
Drew, I didn’t go beyond Europe because the intial discussion was about Europe. And I agree, one can see other factors at work in other places as well.