When I was young, one of the overarching dreads of our
society was the imminent “population explosion” – the threat of humanity
outstripping its planetary space and resources, a fear generated largely by
Paul Erhlich’s seminal 1968 book The
Population Bomb. Like global warming, we simply accepted Erhlich’s doomsday
scenario as inevitable fact. But Jonathan Last, in his new book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting,
claims that not only did the population bomb never explode, the world’s
population will soon begin shrinking. The greatest threat to American life
isn’t terrorism, he asserts, or China, or the crushing debt – it is our
collective reluctance to have more children.
Last is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, Slate, and many other publications. He
is a regular commentator in the media and has appeared on ABC, CNN, Fox News,
NPR and elsewhere. In his compelling short new book, Last explains why the population
implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics
both at home and around the world.
Mark Tapson: Mr. Last, the subtitle of your book is
“America’s Coming Demographic Disaster” – exactly what disaster are we facing?
What
we’re really facing is this: as fertility rates fall, your population’s age
profile inverts, so that you have more old people than young people, which
destabilizes the Social Security and Medicare regimes. And then puts a drag on
the economy, stunting innovation and dynamism. Also, it becomes harder to
maintain your armed forces because of both the demands of the entitlement
system and the skinnier cohort of military-aged men and women. So that’s the
best-case scenario.
The worst-case is that you head toward social
destabilization at home, which pits the generations against one another in a
zero-sum game. A couple of weeks ago in Japan, for example, the country’s
finance minister said that it was time for old Japanese folks to “hurry up and
die.” And then you get geopolitical destabilization abroad, as the autocratic
countries which are struggling with the same problems – China, Russia, Iran – undergo
tumult.
MT: What’s the cause of this fertility collapse?
JL: There’s a whole constellation of factors: the
decline in infant mortality; increasing urbanization; the sexual revolution;
the expansion of college to middle- and lower-middle class Americans; the
creation of Social Security and Medicare; the creation of no-fault divorce; the
rise of cohabitation. This is a partial list.
MT: How have immigrants and women factored into this collapse?
JL: In America, immigrants are the only thing keeping us
from careening off the demographic cliff that Asia and Europe have already
hurled themselves over. But when you look at the fertility rates of
recently-arrived immigrants to America, you find that over a few generations
they begin to move quickly back toward the national average. The effects of our
fertility-dampening culture are that powerful.
The migration of women into the workforce has made the two-income family
nearly a requirement of middle-class life. Feminists don’t want to hear it, but
it’s objectively true that education and workforce participation of women drive
their fertility downward. There are lots of wonderful benefits to having a
country full of educated, working women who have mastered their fertility
planning. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t created demographic problems.
MT: We’re familiar with China’s official One Child Policy; tell us about
America’s unofficial One Child
Policy.
JL: Basically, modern life has evolved in such a way
that middle-class Americans now have about the same number of children as the
Chinese. It isn’t that we don’t want
kids. We do. For 40 years, our average “ideal fertility” has been about 2.5.
But there’s a yawning gap between the kids we want to have – 2.5, on average –and
the kids we do have – 1.9, on average. The key is understanding all of the
economic and cultural factors which cause people, in the real world, to have
fewer kids than they want.
MT: How does this affect our national security?
JL: If Sweden or Japan have to fold up their militaries
in order to pay for their entitlement programs, no one cares. If America does
it, it’s a different story. And a big part of the fertility collapse is that
defense becomes harder and harder to pay for and support.
And out there in the world, there are problem spots. Russia, China, and
Iran are all likely to become increasingly unstable as they come to grips with
their own fertility problems –which are way worse than ours, even. In an
autocratic country, when the state runs into financial ruin, they don’t
typically convene blue-ribbon commissions and have break-out sessions at the
Brookings Institution.
Demographics suggest that one of our
national security focuses for the next fifty years should be managing sudden
instability from fertility-challenged powers.
MT: What
should we be doing, and what shouldn’t we be doing?
JL: What we shouldn’t be doing is trying to lecture and
preach at people who don’t want kids. There are plenty of perfectly rational
reasons not to have babies and what we should say to the people who don’t want
them is: Godspeed.
We also probably shouldn’t expect that we can have the government step in
and adopt a bunch of pro-natalist policies, which solve the problem. A lot of
research has been done on the efficacy of these things and it suggests that (1)
natalist government spending only brings about returns at the margins of the
fertility rate and (2) natalist government programs need to be in effect for
decades in order to achieve even those modest returns. There probably aren’t
any magic bullets.
So what should we do? No one really knows yet. But the guiding precept
for all natalism should be about identifying the roadblocks standing between
the people who want children and the families they find out of reach.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 2/14/13)
