Posted on 02/19/2023 3:04:34 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The following is an overview of Law & Liberty's January forum on the question of demographic decline.
Birth rates are falling across the developed world, and China recently joined the list of countries with a declining population.
These trends have many governments worrying about shrinking workforces and unsustainable elderly entitlements. In Law & Liberty’s January forum, Lyman Stone argues that those concerns are relatively trivial, compared to the loneliness, infertility, suicide, and addiction that are ravaging American society today.
Stone sees strong connections between these maladies and the failure of so many people to marry and have children.
Family life can be a source of tremendous joy and meaning, but more and more Americans are missing out on this, owing to liberalized divorce, high rates of incarceration, a badly designed tax and benefit structure, and other cultural factors. The best antidote to loneliness and despair, Stone argues, is to help people marry, and have the children they already say they want. To that end, he recommends higher alcohol taxes, the elimination of marriage penalties, school vouchers, and liberalized zoning policies, along with child allowances and family leave policies.
David Goldman, in his reply, points out that fertility has not declined precipitously among all developed people. Israel is an important outlier, with an average of about three children per woman, but within the Israeli population it is clear that the highly-religious are boosting the nation’s birth rates. That trend is not unique to Israel, or to Jews. In the United States as well, people who report that religion is important to them have more children. This trend holds even for highly educated women, although the decline in fertility has in general correlated strongly with the rise in female education.
Jesse Smith shares Stone’s interest in a more-robust family policy, but he is dissatisfied with Stone’s decision to focus his argument on the realization of individual fertility preferences. Families are good for so many reasons; why not put them all on the table? We do need more babies to have a thriving economy and hope for the future. Smith notes as well that Stone’s individualist framing may hinder him from understanding the phenomenon in question. Anxious to interpret falling birth rates as tragic evidence of unrealized life goals, he is reluctant to probe the attitudes of potential parents too deeply. A person might genuinely want more kids, without being willing to prioritize family goals over other life goals. If pronatal policies simply ignore those complexities, they may not work.
Susanna Spencer also worries that Stone may be misunderstanding the motives that lead people to build their lives around family and children. She illustrates this by telling the story of her own family, and the open-to-life ethic that she absorbed growing up in a Catholic community. It seems unlikely to Spencer that government benefits or a revised tax code will significantly alter the present fertility situation. Organic community, personal connections, and a prioritizing of human life and relationships are the real key, as John Paul II explained in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae.
Answering the skepticism of multiple respondents, Stone’s final reply sketches many ways in which pronatal policy might in fact have some meaningful effect. Stone points out that it is really quite clear that government policy can influence birth rates, even quite dramatically, as seen in Romania under Nicolae CeauÈ™escu. No one wants that kind of autocracy in America, but gentler policies might still make a difference. Money does help. Housing and education make a real difference, too. Religion is certainly a factor, but Stone notes that its role is also fairly complex. Community support is hugely important to facilitating family life, and it does often go hand in hand with organized religion, but that isn’t inevitably the case. Meanwhile, other forms of community can also help lonely people realize their dream of raising a thriving family.
The way forward, Stone suggests, is to tackle the problem from multiple angles, refusing to accept the present misery and despair as an inevitable consequence of a more secular society.
I have 3 kids so f**k off. Do you know how hard that extra kid makes finding a hotel?
All over the world, developed or not.
Seems to me that the ‘Women’s Liberation Movement’ succeeded in ‘liberating’ women from the chore of having kids.
Yep but it's a problem in East Asia too (demographic decline).
The LGBT agenda and the celebration of abortion might have something to do with it. It’s a cult of anti-fertility.
“Yep but it’s a problem in East Asia too (demographic decline).”
Huge problem there, but same thing - they were also liberated, but a bit later than the radicals in the West.
Killing babies before they can take their first lung-full of the air has far reaching consequences. The good part is Klaus and the wef will have a world all to themselves...except for their mini-me clone army. Still possible for the other inhabitants of this planet who crave true freedom to rise up and stomp the wannabe dictators into the ground where they belong but, you know, weak liberal leaders like their lemmings and cliffs.
Why doesn’t the media and industry focus instead on going to Africa and southeast Asia to talk them into having smaller families instead of focusing on the west and having 3rd worlders pumped into the west?
/Rhetorical question.
That society has “adapted” to presume 0-2 kids creates a recipe for population implosion. A couple of consecutive generations where 2 kids are considered a large family and one will find oneself in an “anti-malthusian” nightmare.
A little bit. Not quite like the West. They are still somewhat traditional in East Asia. So there are other factors that come to play.
LOL - I can truthfully claim there are no children on planet Earth who would have deliberately chosen Zeestephen to be their Father!
There are people everywhere who would and will be wonderful parents.
We should help and encourage them as much as possible.
I think that many have concluded that putting up with an ornery member of the opposite sex who may take half your stuff in a divorce isn’t worth it.
The deep state is trying to kill off 95% of the world population.
I have four. Although 3 are in their 20’s now. Yep always had to get two hotel rooms. But have fun with them. Time does indeed fly by.
Gates and the depopulation fanatics are ecstatic.
My oldest is in college (free too lol) and the other two are young.
I took them on a trip to Japan almost a decade ago and it cost +10k
Ouch. But the experience was so worth it I’m sure. Family trips are so much fun. Awesome one of your children is getting a free ride. One of mine is navy (yes!). Another is in college studying computer science and the other is working as an electrician. Our youngest is 14 so has awhile to decide what she want to do. It’s incredible that we raised all the kids basically the same and they are all different. Good news is so far they sorta like us. Lol.
Yeah, it really is a blessing from God. I hope there’s a world for them to live in.
Agreed. And Albert Bourla's bioweapon is doing a great job of helping. But it's prolly not as effective as planned. Their plan obviously requires more killing to be successful.
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