"Demographic Winter" Coming - More Babies Needed

Worried about too many people breathing and eating burgers, messing up the environment? That puts the focus in the wrong place, as Robert Knight outlines here. Instead of worrying about too many people, we need to be worrying about two few people. "Demographic Winter" is coming, and is much scarier than alarmist environmental worries. The really frightening future is a human race that is rapidly depopulating.

A new documentary, Demographic Winter, provides the grim facts behind the worldwide trend away from having children.

-70 countries, including virtually all of Europe, are now below replacement birth-rate levels.

-Russia’s current population of 140 million will decline to 70 million by 2045 if current trends continue. The economic and political consequences would be staggering.

-The money boom triggered by the Baby Boom is about to run its course in the United States, as the Boomers make less, spend less and retire, drawing on the taxed earnings of a shrinking population of economic producers.

-In Germany, in 2006, in one province alone, 220 schools were padlocked for lack of pupils.

-Japan’s population reduction is so severe that the country is virtually shutting itself down, with labor shortages and plants closing.

Now, if you buy into the global warming theory, this may seem all to the good, since each human is a detriment. As the Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz notes in Demographic Winter

A lot of people I’ve talked to about this say, “Isn’t it great if the birthrate is going down, because, after all, that’s fewer carbon footprints and less stress on Mother Earth.” They’re not thinking about how much their own care is going to cost when they get older.

And it will be costly. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are speeding toward a crash against a fiscal roadblock: the number of workers to pay for it is shrinking. Not only are we creating fewer kids, but more of the ones we do create are being born out of wedlock, which increases the likelihood that they will themselves be less self-sufficient.

Here are some of the scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists and other experts featured in Demographic Winter:

Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker, Rutgers marriage expert David Popenoe, Harvard’s Nicholas Eberstadt, New America Foundation’s Phil Longman, Family Research Council’s Patrick Fagan, Norval Glenn of the University of Texas, and many others, provide data that show the decline of the two-parent family is at the heart of human decline—globally. And it won’t necessarily help the environment.

Oddly, having fewer kids also puts strains on the environment:

Dr. Jianguo Liu, director of sustainability at Michigan State University, notes that “global households are increasing more than the number of people” and thus using more resources. Because of divorce and the rise in single-person households, in 2005 alone in the United States, people used an extra 600 billion gallons of water and 73 billion kilowatts of electricity.

So the nuclear family is actually the most environmentally-friendly way to house people!

Yet the family is under assault by a constant media drumbeat about alternative lifestyles, the illusory “benefits” of the sexual revolution, and the costs of having children.

Environmental groups are saying:

Stop reproducing! Heck, stop marrying! (Unless you’re gay!) Fewer marriages mean fewer children using fewer resources. We get not only a greener earth, but the end of any pesky sexual “norm.”

Meanwhile, young men are increasingly pulling back from marriage and children.

In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006—a dramatic demographic shift for such a short time period. (From http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_single_young_men.html)

People are assets to an economy when they are workers. Working people add to the prosperity of workers and non-workers alike, because of the high productivity rates per worker in developed economies. But there is such a thing as a "working age" - roughly 18-65. When that population falls in relation to those 65 and older, it becomes a "graying" population. That is when we are in big trouble!

The only way to have more workers is to have more children. We also know from many studies that children who do not live with both a mother and a father, married and living in the same house, have more problems and lead less-productive lives as an adult.

So that means the way out of the coming "Demographic Winter" is more marriages, earlier in life, with more children in them, and marriages that last. That, and not dubious environmental alarms, is where our greatest focus should be.