Book review: ‘What to Expect When No One’s Expecting’

Home Culture Book review: ‘What to Expect When No One’s Expecting’

Western civilization will collapse within our lifetimes and our children will scratch out a barren existence in its ashes. Despite the title, Jonathan Last promises to avoid selling doom in his citation-laden new book “What To Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.”

Unfortunately, regardless of whether he wants to make money off despair, he paints a pretty bleak picture of the future.

To start with brute facts, a country needs a total fertility rate (TFR, roughly the average number of babies a woman would bear over her lifetime) of 2.1 to keep the population at the same size.

The population grows and falls as the TFR rises above or falls below 2.1. It makes logical sense: on average, each woman needs to have a bit more than two children to replace her and their father.

Contrary to the expectations propagated by people like Paul Ehrlich, writer of “The Population Bomb,” a declining population is a very bad thing, at least if you like human progress. Natural resources cannot exploit themselves, and so people are necessary for a civilization to develop. In fact, lower fertility rates correlate with decline in economic output.

When fertility rate declines, the median age of a population increases because fewer young children are born to offset the increasing age of the living. But a ‘greying’ population changes the overall inclinations of a population. The bulk of entrepreneurs are between 18 and 34; older people are less inclined to work, to invest money in venture capital, and to be creative and risky.

As a result, an older population will be less innovative, especially when it comes to technology. In the United States, Social Security faces a particular problem. Mr. Last calls it a “Ponzi scheme” which will implode without a continued influx of new participants, in this case, young people.

Unfortunately, Last’s book revolves around the incontrovertible fact that fertility rates are crashing around the world. Every First World country already has an unsustainable fertility rate, and Last declares that “only 3 percent of the world’s population lives in a country whose fertility rate is not declining.”

Recovery seems unlikely. Modernity and education themselves correlate to lower rates of childbearing. In 2001, studies revealed something that has never occurred in history: two countries, Austria and Germany, had an ideal fertility rate below replacement.

Since then, four other countries in Europe have joined the list of populations that consider national suicide the ideal. A birthrate of 1.5 (which a number of European nations are below), will cut a population by 25% every generation.

And while we might want to fix the problem by incentivizing childbearing, government intervention has a depressing track record. For instance, the country of Singapore, when it gained independence from Britain in 1965, initially aimed to drive the country’s fertility rate down from 4.7 by propagandizing, encouraging abortion, imposing financial penalties for additional children, and creating benefits for having only one or two children.

The fertility rate hit Singapore’s target of 2.1 in ten years and continued falling to 1.74 in 1980. After flirting with trying to promote motherhood for educated women only, in 1986 Singapore did a complete about-face.   The government of Singapore promoted motherhood by publicly extolling children, creating tax incentives for having four or more children, increasing maternity leave, subsidizing numerous childrearing expenses, helping grandparents live near grandchildren, campaigning against abortion, and requiring counseling before sterilization or abortion. Singapore’s current fertility rate is 1.11.

People simply cannot be paid to make babies they don’t want.

The real problem with modern birth rates lies neither in the government nor in the marketplace, but in individual selfishness.

Children are inconvenient and dramatically rearrange ones’ life. (Surprise!) But, Last argues, “if you believe in anything seriously enough–God, America, the liberal order, heck, even secular humanism–then eventually babies must follow.” While God probably won’t be affected by our self-extinction, future Americans will be. The question is, will we care?

 

jwalsh@hillsdale.edu