Endangered Species
Bethell, Tom
BYTOM BETHELL Deutschland Unter Alles high, low and medium projections for Germany's population source: United Nations Population Division -q-r E ~ Ben Wattenberg is an...
...The New York Times paid little attention to the birth dearth until recently...
...When I wrote The Birth Dearth, only fifteen years ago, the average European fertility rate was about 1.7,"Wattenberg said...
...Malta's fertility rate is 1.9 and falling...
...and nearly 20 percent for Switzerland...
...and a nationwide referendum to reduce their numbers was defeated in 2000...
...In the Western world today, the average fertility level that yields a steady-state population is considered to be 2.1 children per woman per lifetime...
...America's birth dearth is less dramatic than that of other countries because it takes in far more immigrants than any other country (about a million a year...
...He blinded them with science, you might say, but he was wrong...
...None of 950 employees had qualified when the article was written, but the company estimated that "four or five workers a year" might do so eventually...
...The New York Times reported 18 months ago that a toymaking company in Tokyo had offered a $10,000 bonus to employees who had a third child...
...The U.N.'s medium-variant projection restores that number to 1.6 by 2050...
...Parents would have more children...
...That's more than the country's budget on defense...
...No one expected it or thought it would go this deep, or expected it to stay there that long...
...Meanwhile, the population ages...
...Not much," Eberstadt said...
...There is a point, let's say at $64,000 a child, where it is going to work," Wattenberg said...
...In less developed countries, where infant mortality is higher, the required fertility is higher...
...A decline in births can of course be offset by immigration...
...Still, fertility in France has remained below replacement...
...But in the maternity wards of Italy, there is no sign of any such restoration...
...More people means more pollution," says Negative Population Growth, which lives by the rhetoric of crisis...
...But Eberstadt withheld the Nobel...
...If you are trying to stabilize a country's workforce, it is much easier to import than to produce...
...Japan, where the workforce has been shrinking since 1995, has offered child-bearing incentives, with little effect...
...I asked him if population-control organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation express any concern at all about the worldwide trend...
...There are so many arguments that modernization is the driver of fertility change...
...That is what nobody knows...
...Alan Freeman of the Toronto Globe and Mail published a detailed report on family allowances in France and Germany, noting their"huge cost" France's welfare state "will spend a mind-boggling 290 billion francs (about $70 billion) on its family policy this year," he reported in 1999...
...On the walls of his office were mementos of his earlier career as a speechwriter and assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Senator Hubert H. Humphrey...
...FRANCE 60 m...
...There is no way of measuring all these costs and benefits, so the theory is to some extent self-fulfilling...
...puts out a volume called World Population Prospects...
...Census Bureau, and now retired, is an expert on China's onechild policy, and since his retirement he has kept up with the demographic trends...
...Yet it was France that came first...
...I think they devoted five percent of GDP to it...
...Recall also that we are immersed in a climate of opinion formed by ideologues who are utterly convinced that fewer people is what we need and who are as blind to the dangers of demographic contraction as they have been hostile to the benefits of expansion...
...But it deserves investigation...
...The press is their plaything...
...Raising taxes in these countries is not an option...
...From Norplant to condoms, IUDs to the pill, including both male and female sterilization, birth control products are free to all takers...
...Amazingly, the turning point that now confronts the Western world has received very little attention...
...It is presented first in the tables and exclusively in the press releases--and it gets all the press attention...
...Ironically, the Malthusian bogeyman of geometrical progression will indeed be upon us if present trends continue...
...Population is declining now in the following European countries:Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Ukraine...
...But when it did, in a recent editorial, it right away perceived the looming threat to Europe's welfare states, which will need "75 million immigrants" if business-as-usual is to be preserved...
...Television--a big one in my opinion...
...The shortfall is principally driven by the fact that the boomers didn't have enough babies to support them in their old age...
...Nine of the 15 largest developing countries have fertility levels lower than that of the United States in 1965...
...But the older generation dies off eventually, and then, with the next cycle, smaller cohorts have still smaller numbers of offspring.Then the population starts to shrink dramatically...
...Food-supply more than kept pace...
...Its projections--high, medium, and low--are based on different assumptions about future fertility...
...And when we look at them, particularly those associated with the welfare state, we can see just how much the costs of childbearing and-raising have risen in the past 30 to 40 years...
...But why is that happening...
...World population will continue growing," warns Population Action International...
...He still calls himself a Democrat--another provocation...
...Even the low-variant projections in the developed countries pump up the fertility rates a few decades out...
...Its fertility rate is 2.15...
...So it's an open question...
...If you take a half of a half of a half you start to go down real fast"Wattenberg said...
...34 million) Japan has the same population density as India...
...The truth is that welfare states don't just undermine fertility...
...Quite a bit of intellectual gymnastics were needed to explain exactly how an antinatal family planning program comported with the teachings of the Prophet," Eberstadt said...
...From the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth to A1 Gore's Earth in the Balance, the focus of concern may shift from famine to nonrenewable resources to the earth's supposedly ITALY 57m "~ .. ~. ,,9,,, \ \, \ fragile ecology, but the remedy never varies: population control, birthcontrol, the worldwide distribution of condoms...
...57m try is foreign born, compared with over ten percent for the U.S...
...For years he eorreoted gloomy who thought they were losing the war of ideas...
...Go to the international conferences, and listen to some of the demographers...
...Insofar as there will be gains from it, and I am not sure there will be any, the United States will become relatively more powerful and influential" For many other countries, he said, the problems are going to be "slow-motion brutal...
...1, 26m for several years...
...No one knows how much further it may go...
...This is called "momentum...
...The summary of its 2000 revision had just been released, and he had been pondering what he called "these incredible declines in fertility...
...The decline of human capital and the aging of populations cannot auger well for economies that depend on creativity for their advancement...
...The word they keep coming up with is 'unsustainable.'" That was what Antonio Golini, a demographer at the University oflKome, told Wattenberg...
...Those who are welcomed when doing the manual labor that others shun will be less kindly regarded if they seek to live at the taxpayers' expense...
...He is 68 now, and he has a daughter who was born when he was 50...
...We're talking about a group that currently has somewhat over three births per woman per lifetime.As a group they are also relatively low income in the U.S...
...Steven Sindig, an establishment demographer at Columbia University, formerly with the Rockefeller Foundation, confirmed recently that the world is indeed turning out much as Wattenberg said it would...
...So you have a basic conflict of interest that affects both humanitarian and professional interests and causes them to behave publicly in ways that are not entirely forthright...
...The key number that demographers watch is the total fertility rate.A couple must have two children to replace themselves...
...The title of a book he published in 1984 gives the flavor: The Good News ls the Bad News Is Wrong...
...Bill Gates wants to "expand access" to family planning, while Warren Buffett is another billionaire who favors fewer people.The Population Research Institute's Steven Mosher, who was expelled from China when he drew attention to that country's coercive policy, says of Buffett:"It is hard to understand why a man like him, so blessed with material goods, should take so misanthropic a view of the people with whom he shares the planet, and from whose existence he profits...
...figures show that 50 years from now their fertility rate is still at 2.1...
...The population-controllers will tell you that the world's population continues to increase...
...Capital is fleeing the Continent at an unprecedented rate...
...they stymie its most obvious remedy--immigration...
...He points out that the great consequence of the welfare state was to "transfer income from people of child-bearing age to older people...
...He has been a senior fellow for over 20 years at AEI in Washington, D.C.When I saw him his spectacles were in their customary place--propped up on his bald forehead...
...They tend to dismiss it, because the priority attached to their funding is based on a public sense of alarm over population growth...
...Well, it doesn't prove that because you don't know how far it would have gone without it...
...And what do you know...
...Before that happened, he argues, the U.S...
...In the process, sex has come off the list of 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR " SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OOI taboo subjects in the Islamic Republic...
...But all the news stories were able to give that figure as evidence that world population is climbing as rapidly as ever.The essentially political decision to revive the fertility rates in the years ahead was not mentioned...
...For one thing, government officials no doubt realize that saying there are too few people, so soon after the hue and cry about there being too many, would destroy their own credibility...
...But it also has its uses...
...So large an influx seems politically unlikely, and the underlying problem was tagged as one of "racism and xenophobia"--categories much more comforting to The Times than the strange notion of welfare states devouring their own children...
...Every two years, the U.N...
...As no meter can measure such subjective things, the underlying theory can never be falsified...
...The European experience more generally has shown how expensive it would be to get the state into any sort of a successful program...
...Thereafter, a decline in economic growth and equity returns is foreseen...
...Long-term fertility decline started in France around the time of the Napoleonic Wars...
...In answer to the same question, Nick Eberstadt said: "If you can find the shared, underlying determinants of fertility decline in such disparate countries as the United States, Brazil, Sri Lanka,Thailand and Tunisia, then your Nobel Prize is in the mail...
...Paul S. Hewitt, project director of the Global Aging Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, testified before Congress last September that global aging has the potential to be "a firstrank crisis, one that wipes out the modern welfare state as we know it...
...The cost of getting them to stay home instead, and have more children, will SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OOI 9 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 have to exceed those foregone wages.Japan illustrates the problem...
...In the underdeveloped world today, 2.4 children per woman may be close to the replacement rate...
...Hoover's Bernstam believes that with the end of income transfers from young to old, fertility will return to replacement levels...
...I said that he had found a subject that surely challenged his customary optimism...
...Wrong...
...for the field of demography has long been overpopulated with alarmists...
...As to the European experiments, Eberstadt said that Sweden had carried out the most expensive campaign, in the early 1990s...
...Foundations would hardly know what to do without it...
...Current retirees, and those who expect to retire soon, have the political clout to ensure that benefit levels remain untouched...
...Not only were the costs of child-bearing increasing, but the benefits were diminishing...
...If this is borne out, it will adversely affect the whole world...
...Disappointed by the failure of New Soviet Man and other fantasies, the Western intelligentsia have substituted for their lost faith in progress a cosmic pessimism...
...Foreign nationals must have lived in the country for 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OO...
...One economic demographer who proposed a theory of fertility decline associated with the rise of the welfare state is Michael Bernstam of the Hoover Institution...
...A real estate shakeout is also on the horizon...
...If you downgrade it, there are other critical issues, and the funds will go elsewhere...
...Wattenberg leafed through a document on his desk...
...Modern communications.This situation, as much as you can say about any demographic trend, is universal...
...Among his scenarios was one in which 65 million Americans died of starvation in the 1980suthe age of overweight welfare moms.Yet, hardly a year goes by when Ehrlich does not receive another award or prize...
...We are only now beginning to realize that because this system ofintergenerational transfers resembles a Ponzi scheme, its long-run stability depends on an ever-increasing supply of children who become good taxpayers in turn.The last 25 years have shown that this simply is not happening...
...Straggle-bearded and Russian-accented, Bernstam stresses that he quit the field of demography ten years ago, and today he calls himself simply a"thinker" (not normally permitted at think tanks...
...Or take Italy, where total fertility is now 1.2...
...But immigration to Europe is low.To Japan, it is non-existent.The Europeans are beginning to talk about small increases...
...Economic growth has been close to zero over this period" It is conventional to think of child-bearing today in economic terms...
...And can anything be done to reverse them...
...So, would the promise of a tax break of a couple of hundred dollars a year encourage them to have a number of additional children...
...Brazil, the sixth largest country, illustrates RUSSIA 145 m...
...The one outlier may be sub-Saharan Africa and even there you have the beginnings of dramatic declines...
...Plainly, they have not been sufficient to revive fertility...
...Some...
...On this analysis, birth rates will eventually recover if the welfare state collapses...
...But you have to have an elastic definition to see the rule of imams over the last 22 years as a modernizing force...
...Europe's fate in the next decade will be interesting to watch, for the crisis will surely erupt in that period.The problems will be equally severe in Japan.We are beginning to see analyses of"global aging" from investment houses...
...The U.N.'s lowvariant projection shows world population peaking in 2040 at about 7.46 billion people...
...He is the moderator of"Think Tank," seen weekly on PBS, and an author and a columnist...
...But it is not an optimistic theme...
...Below-replacement fertility has been going on for 25 years,Wattenberg added...
...The David and Lucile Packard Foundation believes that "continued growth of the world's population places unprecedented demands on the earth's resources, and impacts the quality of life for both present and future generations...
...Intergenerational resentment may rise...
...It was based on the remarkable facts of demography that were already available by the mid-1980s.All the predictions of the "population explosionists" were not only turning out to be wrong, they were if anything the opposite of the truth...
...In a roundabout way, the welfare analysis is confirmed by examining this question: What would it take to restore Western fertility rates to replacement level...
...That was achieved mostly by stealth, with inflation moving employees into higher tax brackets...
...And as their participation increases, you can guess what that does to childbearing...
...10 years without interruption to qualify for "supplementary benefit," and Social Security goes to citizens only...
...Ted Turner has spoken of mankind as "breeding like a plague of locusts," and his foundation "sees the whole field of environmentalism and population as nothing less than the survival of the human species...
...at the moment probably is Mexican Americans...
...Inevitably, the "medium variant" seems the most probable...
...There is no sign of it" If the present fertility rates persist, Europe's population, currently 727 million (including Russia), is expected to decline by 171 million people, or 24 percent, by 2050...
...Its drop in the early decades of this century accompanied a parallel drop in child mortality rates, and meanwhile the population kept on expanding as a result of considerable immigration (concentrated in the first two decades of the century...
...Trying to find a"general theory" has proved to be frustrating, Eberstadt added...
...It's hard to believe that abortion and contraception, not to mention the worldwide anti-natalist propaganda, have not played a role...
...Some costs and benefits--in particular those associated with buying things for children, educating them, working, paying taxes, and receiving benefits from the welfare state-can to some extent be measured in money terms...
...It is striking that race relations in Britain, a country that is regarded as generous with benefits for refugees, and where less than 4 percent of the population is foreign born, are considerably worse than they are in Switzerland, where the foreign born percentage is five times higher than it is in Britain...
...Better contraception...
...It would be marked, Hewitt said, by: declining asset values, falling levels of consumption, spikes in precautionary saving by aged workers, falling growth rates and hence tax revenues, chronic budget deficits, declining returns to investment, capital outflows, and currency crises...
...He has been proved right far more often than not.Although he is not a professional demographer, the study of population has long been one of his interests, and in 1987 he wrote The Birth Dearthm"a speculation and a provocation," he called it...
...When I suggested to Nick Eberstadt that a successful pro-natalist policy might spell the end of the welfare state, he said:"You would be talking about sums comparable to what the welfare state absorbs...
...Decline in Japan and Europe will hardly leave the U.S...
...Infant-mortality ranges from about 250 per thousand births in Afghanistan and Mali, to 6 in Scandinavia...
...The news is that fertility rates "'ave declined worldwide, not just in Europe.According to the U.S...
...Ben Wattenberg is right to warn that we may be at a "major turning point...
...Only in a climate of crisis will the necessary reforms occur, and the stage of crisis has not yet been reached...
...One of America's leading demographers, Sam Preston at the University of Pennsylvania, said that if European fertility rates were to return to 2.1 tomorrow, the continent would still lose about 100 million people in the next 50 years...
...For many countries (wherever fertility rates have fallen below replacement), the medium projection arbitrarily reflates the fertility rate to something closer to replacement, without any factual basis...
...But as we shall see, the fertility declines that were apparent by the 1980s had only begun their fall...
...estimates that net migration from the rest of the world, including refugees, to the whole of Europe is less than a million a year...
...In 1964 we had one million births SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2001 -THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 putants with technical-sounding arguments about geometrically increasing population and arithmetically growing food supply...
...In 1989, the mullahs admitted the family planners and the condom crowd, and births duly plunged...
...The more Japan worries about labor shortages, the more interest there is in increasing women's participation in the work force," Eberstadt said...
...Suppose we had a system where couples with a fourth child would cease to pay taxes, I asked.What effect would that have...
...I...
...In Germany, for example, 20,000 qualified high-tech workers may soon be admitted annually...
...is the only country where immigration levels are high enough to do so...
...In congressional testimony last year, CSIS'S Paul Hewitt pointed out that in the next 25 years, elderly populations in the industrialized world will rise by 120 million people, while those of working age (all of them in the U.S...
...France was a lot poorer than England, a lot less educated, a lot more rural, a lot less industrial, and of course it was Catholic, which supposedly impedes changes in family size...
...But as some die before reaching childbearing age, additional children are needed to replace them.Also, slightly more boys than girls are born all over the world (no one knows why) . Therefore, each couple must on average have slightly more than two children if a population is to remain stable...
...One reason for this is that European companies face the prospect of declining unit salesas far as the eye can see...
...The finite resources of the world cannot support an infinite number of people," intones Zero Population Growth...
...Having failed to become Supermen, humans are denigrated as pollution sources.The anti-human propaganda of the environmentalists has become so fervent that we need to be reminded of an elementary truth: people are good...
...In its flagging currency, the euro, Europe, too, is beginning to exhibit symptoms of decline...
...In Switzerland, a severe obstacle course confronts all welfare-seekers...
...r |30m JAPAN 12o m 110m 0 eL To some degree it has been investigated...
...Italy, Germany and several smaller countries will experience dramatic declines in their household-forming age groups-Italy could have 30 percent fewer persons aged 25-40 by 2020...
...In welfare states, therefore, a rational sense of limits to the state's redistributive powers is apt to be construed as racism, particularly by those who adamantly support state "generosity" to foreigners...
...A rarely noted point is that the welfare state makes its own contribution to xenophobia, and this in turn greatly complicates the task of admitting more immigrants...
...The many organizations dedicated to spreading alarm about population growth show no sign of acknowledging what is happening.John Baird, formerly the head of the China division of the U.S...
...Modern Western women have alternatives to childbearing.You would have to offer them competitive or even superior wages simply to stay home and have children...
...In the years ahead, such a project will become even more expensive.As the working population shrinks, as is already happening in Europe and in Japan, rising wage offers will attract more women into the workforce...
...Census Bureau, 83 countries and territories, encompassing about 44 percent of the world's population, are now experiencing below-replacement fertility...
...If one takes the view that socioeconomic improvements lead to lower family size why would it have been the France of Victor Hugo rather than Dickensian England...
...Despite today's unfavorable exchange rate and the supposed overvaluation of U.S...
...Its consequences cannot easily be foreseen, but they are likely to be less benign than the environmentalists have led us to believe...
...Indeed, the population of a country will continue to rise for a number of years after fertility has fallen below replacement...
...Only 1.2 percent of the counUNITED KINGDOM 83 m ': 59 m ~I...
...Birth control allowed sex to be separated from procreation, and a constitutional right to abortion was conjured out of thin air by a politicized Supreme Court...
...Brazil is hitting replacement now,"Wattenberg said...
...The education of women...
...In some Swiss cantons 30 percent of the workers are foreign born...
...Now, the old-folks were being looked after by the state, and so an important incentive for having children was removed...
...The first consequence of the birth dearth, then, is that welfare states are in jeopardy everywhere...
...Parents are also eligible for a $2,000 subsidy every quarter for a child under three, and $1,000 for a child from three to six.There are back-to-school allowances, housing allowances, creches, day care, subsidized rail travel for large families, and so on...
...Eberstadt said that for a program to achieve the desired result, the government would have to "devote a large portion of national output to employing woman as childbearers instead of office workers.You can appreciate what an extraordinarily expensive project that would be...
...Goldman Sachs's report earlier this year ("Global Aging: Capital Market Implications"), took a relatively benign view, foreseeing that "global aging should have a positive effect on the capital markets between 2001 and 2010 as baby boomers and governments focus on saving for retirement...
...So it's a vicious circle...
...What "benefit" would be high enough to overcome the "costs" of childbearing...
...BYTOM BETHELL Deutschland Unter Alles high, low and medium projections for Germany's population source: United Nations Population Division -q-r E ~ Ben Wattenberg is an optimist by nature...
...If the inflow continues at that rate, it will not be nearly enough to ofl%t the decline in births.At the moment, the U.S...
...The highest fertility population in the U.S...
...But over the past 35 years that number has dropped from over six children per woman...
...acquisitions in August [2000] alone...
...untouched...
...Remember, 1.7 was already 20 percent below replacement...
...But it is not going back to 2.1"' Wattenberg said...
...Family support for each child, a paid bonus, and so on...
...Property values have collapsed...
...But raising the subsidy high enough to induce significantly more births is also unlikely...
...For this he was called an alarmist--the wrong kind of alarmist...
...Now it is about 1.4...
...In the low-variant projection, Italy's fertility rate is unchanged, and the country's population drops from today's 57 million to 40 million by 2050...
...Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, and Switzerland are probably also on the verge of decline...
...Because the women of child-bearing age were born (say) 30 years earlier, at a time when the age groups were larger, the total population will slowly increase, even though the new childbearing cohort has fewer children...
...The transfer of cash benefits to older peopie made them increasingly independent of their children, and, by the same token, young people foresaw that the new system would give them independence when they came to retire.The consequence (unintended) was to remove what has historically been seen as one of the most important "economic" benefits of child-bearing: children returned the favor by looking after their parents in their old age...
...SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OOI " THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR And there is no good theory as to why it might go up again...
...But they are not advertising the fact," Baird said, "because demography gets a good deal of its funding from the public perception that population is a critical issue...
...They showed world population, currently 6.1 billion, growing by 50 percent to 9.3 billion in 2050.That number is "science fiction" Eberstadt said, because no one knows how many children unborn children will have...
...Today, the environment (rather than famine) is the overriding rationale for promoting population control abroad, and it is the theme song of all the major populationcontrol groups...
...We may expect, therefore, that adverse consequences will not be anticipated, and, when they come, will be blamed on almost anything other than "too few people...
...Consumer spending has fallen for 29 straight months...
...I am still an optimist," he said...
...They don't seem to" he said...
...Not if they are calculating at all.What about Anglo-Americans...
...Demographer Michael Teitelbaum called the book "seriously exaggerated...
...K...
...In a newspaper column on the latest population figures from the United Nations Population Division (the source of almost aH the figures in this article), he wrote that Europe by the year 2050 will be a "senior theme park of castles and cuisine, pretending to be a continent...
...Flows into financial assets of the eight leading industrial countries "should grow from $65 trillion to $144 trillion by the year 2010...
...He foresaw that within two decades much of the industrial world could find itself in a "aging recession...
...That assessment may be too pessimistic, but we surely need to be reminded that we are entering into a phase of history unprecedented for the modern, developed economy...
...It is not how we would have thought about it earlier, but for journalists and analysts in our day it is second nature.The idea is that the "costs" of having children (or the "marginal cost" of having one more) is high compared to the benefits...
...argument that if we stop population aid (which I favor) then fertility will go up" But he also said'"I do think the Ehrlichs of the world have a lot to answer for...
...By the late 1960s, however, the welfare state had been expanded dramatically, and the burden of taxation rose commensurately...
...Maybe some impact, but I think it r USA 450 m 350m /~ 1,1 j~ J .300 m _j~~ 250 m 200 m r ==~ ,.---, r r ~ r would be marginal...
...135 m \ ,. \ 125 m eL 9 \\ eL '\> 115m ,. \ .. \ 105m the manipulation of the numbers...
...But it will be ratcheting down, not up...
...But the assumptions underlying the Goldman Sachs report are murky, and posit too optimistically steady-state productivity and labor-participation rates...
...But why not in England...
...In cases where it doesn't seem to hold--when parents have several children--we simply assert that the CHINA g , . ~ 1.2h 800 m overall "benefits" of children (including the .joy they bring to their parents) are high compared to their costs...
...When I asked Wattenberg if he could assign a cause, his litany told me that there was no easy answer: "Modernism, in all its many facets...
...One country where a decline in childbearing occurred with amazing speed is Iran...
...Its population has leveled off and soon will decline...
...When I read that sentence, I decided to go and see him...
...A unified theory of fertility decline could simply be this: Propaganda works.The anti-natalist campaign of the last 35 years has indeed delivered its barren fruit...
...Not for the Europeans, not for the Japanese...
...The retail and construction sectors are on deficit-financed life support...
...will rise by just five million...
...Parents receive $165 a month for their second child, $212 for their third and each subsequent child...
...Iran's campaign has won worldwide praise," said Robin Wright in the Los Angeles Times...
...The unadjusted dependent-child deduction was dramatically reduced by the same subterfuge...
...But in recent decades, the low-variant forecasts have come closer to describing what actually happened...
...So the argument is that pro-natalism doesn't work," said Wattenberg, reviewing the European experience...
...Legal abortion...
...The move from farm to city...
...i 56m g N N N N N N Likewise,Wattenberg: "Population growth has gone down everywhere, including places with no population programs.Which undermines the U.N...
...In Italy, the average fertility rate has declined to an amazing 1.2...
...Without "human capital" there would be no wealth.Where people are sparse, countries are usually impoverished.Youth itself is a talent, as the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer said, and in the years ahead, as young people in Western societies become scarce relative to their elders, it seems likely that innovation will diminish...
...But he prospered mightily in the history books, and in the twentieth century he attracted endless disciples...
...Because it's a less developed country, they don't take it below that"That's the rule they follow.And that is why the medium variant projection shows continued growth in world population...
...Few analysts other thanWattenberg, and his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Nicholas Eberstadt, have publicly drawn attention to it...
...What are the causes and consequences of these remarkable declines in fertility...
...But Wattenberg told me recently: "I think it may be a major turning point in the history of the species...
...The downward trend of the 1980s has continued since then.The birth dearth is upon us...
...The European and Japanese experience has shown that the point at which many couples could be induced to have a third or a fourth child is so high that the welfare state would have to be shut down to pay for it...
...He promptly looked it up on a website...
...Rapid population growth continues to be a significant worldwide problem," says the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, despite "the impact of organized family planning programs...
...That is the stage many countries are in now...
...Capitalism was winnin he said, and the Cold War would soon be won...
...Europe fears immigration from outside the Continentmwithin the European Union there is free migration--while for Japan excluding foreigners is "a religion," as Wattenberg put it.The country deports more people than it naturalizes.With about 126 million people in a country the size of California (pop...
...So it does have its problems...
...Family allowances in Germany, in place since 1955, are comparable to those in France, or perhaps somewhat smaller...
...That doesn't mean that it's affordable...
...It is hard not to conclude that politics, not science, explains this statistical massaging...
...Increasingly, women entered the labor force to help alleviate the burden, and, not surprisingly the preferred family size fell at the same time...
...In the early release of the UNPD'S 2000 revisions, for example, only the medium-variant projections were included...
...But when...
...When I spoke to him one day, Wattenberg pointed out that the U.N.'S projections of future population have to some extent hidden the coming crisis...
...The underlying problem is consistently misrepresented...
...Family allowances have been in place since the late 1930s in France...
...One gets back to the tautology: Fertility is declining because desired family size is declining...
...He added that he does not believe we will end up with no people: the present trend will surely turn around...
...The best known is the Stanford University doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, who revived Malthusian arguments with his best-seller, The Population Bomb...
...On the day I saw Eberstadt, it was reported in The New York Times that Malta is now the only country in Europe that still prohibits abortion and divorce...
...Talking instead about below-replacement "throws in a very different alarm and one that does not serve their purposes at all...
...The U.N...
...It has either peaked, or in a few years will start to decline in: Belgium, Croatia, Finland, Germany, and Greece...
...Feminists and Western journalists were thrilled...
...Fertility has dropped just as fast in Brazil, where there has been no national population-control program, as it has in Mexico, where there has been a"big, muscular government program...
...In European countries, and in Japan, incentives and bonuses for additional children have been offered.These have had minimal effect, however, showing that the incentives, if they are to work at all, have not to date been strong enough...
...If this sounds familiar, it should...
...Japan, in my opinion, already is in an aging recession...
...Fertility rates are now below replacement in every European count W, with the exception of Albania, and this has persisted for long enough that within the last two years the overall population of Europe has started to decline in absolute numbers.That will accelerate dramatically in the years ahead...
...In fact, France is one of the few countries in Europe where population is not now dropping...
...Now Sweden's fertility rate is lower than ever...
...And as you think through the expense of any sort of a serious pro-natalist policy, you are led to the alternative of immigration...
...Other analyses are less optimistic...
...Demographers themselves have been backing away from the population-crisis idea CANADA '~OC 31 m...
...Its family policy may have succeeded in warding off something worse...
...equities, German companies announced $94 billion in U.S...
...Overpopulation remains an eminently fashionable cause...
...The news media have fallen for this threecard trick...
...I've given speeches and women have come up to me saying that back then they wanted a second or third child but it was 'unpopular' because of Ehrlichism...
...fertility rate had been at replacement level for a long time...
...It is attributed to "the aging of the babyboomers," Wattenberg says...
...The immediate result was a jump in the birth rate, followed by a slump to even lower levels.What happened was that people who had been vaguely thinking about having a child a few years down the road decided, well, let's do it now before the incentives go away.The timing changed, but not the number of children...
...Citizens who may tolerate transfer payments in principle will be less well disposed once they perceive that, to qualify for support, a foreigner needs only get his foot across the border...
...It is now on the verge of sub-replacement...
Vol. 34 • September 2001 • No. 7
