David Frum, reviewing Mark Steyn's book, makes a great point that's been weirdly ignored during the contemporary fad over demographic fear-mongering: "Demographic trends have a surprising way of reversing themselves with amazing rapidity. Nobody foresaw the baby boom in 1938. And yet only eight years later, birth rates surged all through the developed world, in devastated Germany and Japan as well as in victorious Britain and America. OK, there was a big war in between. But s late as 1966, most forecasters thought the baby boom would continue indefinitely."
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Predictions Are Hard, Especially About the Future
18 Mar 2007 10:44 pm
Comments (26)
"But if we want below replacement fertility to change, we ought to be thinking about how to bring that change about, not just sitting back and letting stuff happen."
Damn straight, Steve. Otherwise, we'll be overrun with darkies contaminating our precious bodily fluids.
Force attractive, athletic and rich white couples to have more babies. You will also have to legalize all Central and South American nannies. Incentivize or else you will just end up with more Mormons and Catholics and no one wants that.
Personally, I'm cool with America outsourcing childbirth to other countries where labor is cheaper. (The raw materials for me were produced overseas, though in my case the labor was on American soil.)
But if we want below replacement fertility to change, we ought to be thinking about how to bring that change about, not just sitting back and letting stuff happen.
Uh, but what if we do it and it was gonna happen anyway and we just get a ridiculous number of babies everywhere? It was your bright idea, Steve, so you can take care of the diapers. You may notice that the color of the poop is uncorrelated with the color of the baby. Make of that what you will.
"The raw materials for me were produced overseas, though in my case the labor was on American soil."
That's classic.
"The raw materials for me were produced overseas, though in my case the labor was on American soil."
While I'll applaud your decision to have yourself delivered by organized labor, Neil, I will note that you haven't addressed Steve Sailer's and Mark Steyn's perfectly cromulent point that you represent a contamination of America's purity of essence.
This is an appropriate time to point out:
(1) Johann Hari's deadly demolition job on Steyn, which is a very useful chaser after Frum's literally idiotic bootlicking of him: http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1082 . (Hari includes, among a multitude of other points, the revelation that Steyn has no college education and that it shows. Steyn turns out to be yet another of those people whose sarcastic style conceals the fact that he doesn't know what he's talking about.)
(2) The fact that the actual Moslem population of Europe is currently 5%, and projected to rise to 10% by 2020, according to Daniel Pipes in an otherwise apocalyptic-sounding rant on the subject ( http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:GNxoFpQvOOkJ:www.falange.us/moslem5a.htm+moslems+europe+population&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us ) -- and then only if Europe continues to allow wholesale Moslem immigration. By that time, of course, God only knows what will have happened to the Moslem world as a whole. If this is going to lead to the collapse of Europe, we might as well give up everywhere right now and start wearing burkhas. (But then, as Hari points out, Steyn don't hold much with that there arithmetic stuff.)
True, but the tendency for upper middle class cultures to drop below replacement fertility rates is close to universal.
this is totally false. see sarah blaffer hrdy in mother nature, until the late 19th century the upper middle class and upper classes were baby machines vis-a-vis the lower orders. one reason eugenics arose in these classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that there was a reversal of these classical trends which surprised many. in many cultures, such as pre-modern china or greece, the lower orders didn't even replace themselves (in greece they were pretty much discouraged from doing so if they were slaves).
also, greg clark's farwell to arms surveys the higher fecundity of the western elites until the late modern (i.e., 20th century) vis-a-vis the lower orders. you can also confirm this genetically, a few males (elite) tend to contribute overwhelmingly to future generations. e.g., about 0.4% of human males are directly (that is, male to male to male....) descended from a man who lived in mongolia around 1,000 years ago. the success of genghis khan and his progeny and siblings probably had something to do with this. male lineages exhibit this pattern relatively commonly, one ancestry line tends to explode during a brief period of success. this implies that high status males had a lot of children vis-a-vis low status males (who left less progeny due to simple arithmetic). the demographic & historical data confirms the same, to lesser extent (because of biological constraints), for women.
i am trying to be a fascist about this because the modern (last few decades) are assumed to be normal by most people. they're not.
All right, Razib, call them post-modern cultures or feminist cultures or college educated cultures or whatever you want, but which ones today are above replacement fertility: perhaps Argentina and Israel? America is much closer to stable fertility than any EU country. We now have a generation's experience across several dozen countries, all pointing in the same direction: failure to replace.
For a long time, demographers assumed that fertility rates would rise back up to replacement levels because, well, because that would be nice if it happened. But, it generally hasn't happened.
Population projecions are precisely that - projections. But I think Steve Sailer is correct that it is highly unlikely that fertility rates in some parts of Europe will rise so significantly that they will not have significant challenges funding their pensions and health care systems, for example.
Having said this there is likely to be some "recuperation" because part of the reason for declining fertility is that most women (and men) postpone having children rather than choosing not to have children at all. What this mean is that you need to look at completed fertility and not current fertility- i.e. how many children women have by the time they reach menopause rather than how many the current cross-section are having. For example, the current fertility rate in Australia is about 1.85 - high compared to a lot of Europe but still below replacement, but completed fertility is actually about 2.1.
However, when you look at countries with extremely low fertility (currently 1.2) like Germany, Italy, Greece and Austria, recuperation will increase birth rates, but it is not going to get them up to anything like replacement. (It is interesting that the lowest fertility is actually in countries like Japan and Korea and city states like Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau.)
Despite this, Steyn's idea that Europe is going to become rapidly Muslim is complete crap, if I may use that expression. They are a relatively small minority and any sensible population projections show that they will increase as a share of the population, but still remain a relatively small minority.
Some other points: France now has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe - close to 2.0, and the fertility rate of "white" French people is probably a bit higher than that of Non-Hispanic "white" Americans. 2nd - the most rapid decline in fertility in virtually any country in the world over the past 20 years has been in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Finally, if I was going to worry abou a country with an excess of young people over the next 30 years it would be Yemen.
Matthew, I appreciate you reading right wing sites so I don't have to wade through all of the muck but you're really linking to posts with this kind of logic:
Think of welfare reform in the United States. Welfare rolls began to shrink even before the welfare laws were changes, as welfare recipients realized: "Oh, they're serious this time. I guess I'd better get a job." Europeans are no less amenable to new realities than the American underclass.
Steve, right now we are in the process of absorbing one of the most dramatic shifts in environment a species can encounter. Birth control! If Nature were a god she'd be in a towering rage! It's thrown our adaptedness to the environment completely haywire. It's hard to even think of a good natural analog to what we're hitting here, in terms of the degree to which we are currently maladapted to our environment.
But natural selection continues. People, especially women, who do not particularly want to have children are not having them. Thus, there is -- must be -- tremendous selectional pressure for genes which predispose people to want children as such, and not (the old adaptation) just sex. Of course, this pressure has only been on for a few generations.
I don't know how many generations of culling it will take, but so long as natural selection is true, eventually humanity will get back to breeding like bunnies. Whether it takes cultural adaptations, or genetic ones, or technilogical advances (most likely IMO), it will happen.
'Course, maybe the Singularity will hit first, so the point is moot in several ways. But before that happens we'll have technical solutions, most likely. And I'd certainly not be counting on it.
For liberals, the challenge is in making sure that the adaptation that brings us back into balance is not one which renders women subservient. It's a very real problem. Islam, to take the most salient example, has thus far managed to solve the problem in that manner. Whether or not Islam will yield under the rather awesome pressure of capitalism and individualism and become feckless and insipid, as Christianity has, is the zillion dollar question of this century.
We now have a generation's experience across several dozen countries, all pointing in the same direction: failure to replace.
The entire point of this post is that "a generation's experience" is not nearly enough to start acting like a bunch of know-it-alls.
David Frum is a neocon who supports the illegal war in Iraq and the third-world invasion of the United States. His loyalty is to Israel, not the United States.
If you want to see what REAL conservatives are up to, check out:
http://www.conservativeexodusproject.com/
.
hey! David Frum's loyalty is to CANADA. We're just loaning him to you guys. (Take your time.)
Leonard is right: the obvious result of available birth control is, a long way down the line, a species that wants babies as much as it now wants sex.
And Steve seems to think that we should obviously want the fertility rate to rise again. Why? What if I believe that Britain would actually be a nicer country with only 50 million inhabitants rather than 60 million?
I've always worried a little bit about the dynamic Leonard describes, since it implies that ultimately Malthus will be right. (As he is about every other species and all times before him.)
David: Actually Frum, despite his numerous faults, has always been a critic of the 1965 Immigration Act and an opponent of illegal immigration.
Re: in many cultures, such as pre-modern china or greece, the lower orders didn't even replace themselves
If you're just talking about the urban lower class then you could be correct (especially if you are talking about slaves). But the rural peasantry was noted almost everwyhere in all eras for its large families, and it was by migration of the excess population from rural areas that cities usually sustained their numbers and grew-- cities right up into the 1800s being such unhealthy places that their death rates often exceeded their birth rates. Moreover if you look back through history you can find previous examples of people fretting that the "right" people weren't having enough children while the "wrong" people were having too many; the emperor Augustus felt so two thousand years ago and did everything in his power to get upper class Romans to have more kids.
Re: I don't know how many generations of culling it will take, but so long as natural selection is true, eventually humanity will get back to breeding like bunnies.
You are assuming that you are dealing with genetic factors not cultural ones. However I doubt that is the case. Biologically fertility may owe a lot to genes, but the desire to have children (and the means to do so) is almost entirely cultural and circumsutantial. And in evolutionary terms genetic evolution has largely ended in humankind and evolution is mainly cultural now (in which category I include technology too). It's hard to imagine how natural selection and biological evolution could start happening in humans again, unless we posit some catastrophe of immense proportions like a major asteroid strike overwhelming culture and technology. And finally, humans have never "bred like bunnies". Our species follows a common enough (and quite viable) reproductive strategy that involves have few offspring, but lavishing resources on them to insure their survival and success.
Re: We now have a generation's experience across several dozen countries, all pointing in the same direction: failure to replace.
Given that the human population is now far, far greater than it's ever been, "failure to replace" for a few generations may not be a bad thing. In fact the population could probably fall back to a "mere" billion of us, and the world would be OK. In fact given the persistence of technology, science, infrastructure, etc. if that falling off happens gradually and peacfully, the world might well be much, much better than OK-- those billion people could live so well they would regard even the richest of us as hopelessly deprived paupers.
I suspect there is some genetic variance in the desire to get natal (and not just nasty). There have always been ways to have sex without babies: infanticide, if it came to that.
JonF, the "bunnies" were figurative.
Genetic evolution has not stopped in humans, nor can it. Evolution -- genetic evolution -- must happen so long as we have differential reproduction rates; and we manifestly do.
It's also clear that people vary quite a bit in terms of how much they want children, even within a culture. I don't have any data on this, but I don't think this is particularly controvertial. Some people really want to have kids. Others, not so much. Whether or not this desire is under genetic influence is another thing, but I have no reason to think it is not, at least partially. (My bet, if I had to, would be on 50/50 nature/nurture, the same sort of split as occurs with many other mental traits.) Well, anything that is even somewhat under genetic control, is a locus upon which evolution -- genetic evolution -- may be operating. Will be operating if it affects reproductive success, as is almost certainly the case with "desire for kids".
In any case, as I thought I wrote explicitly, I was not making any particular assumptions about the breakdown of causation between nature and nurture. It doesn't matter anyway, because selection operates on the whole individual, both phenotype and culture. So we will change culture or genes, or both simultaneously. My bet is on culture, particularly technology, as I said before. When we invent an artificial womb, we'll be well on the way to overcoming one of the reasons why wealthy modern Western societies aren't reproducing at replacement levels.
Ah yes, the old quote about predicting the future, first articulated by Yogi Berra, Neils Bohr, Casey Stengel, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw (or was it one of 19 other people, possibly more?)
Like changes in average global temperatures?
In the mid-seventies, after global temperatures had been cooling for more than three decades, global cooling was portrayed as an imminent danger of catastrophic proportions. Then global temperatures began rising and have continued to inch upwards over the last three decades, so cooling stopped being sensationalized (for the worst, since global cooling presents a far more threatening existential threat to humanity than warming does) and warming became the story.
Just because something has been capricious in the past doesn't mean it's prudent to write-off thinking about it in the present as a waste of time.
Re: Genetic evolution has not stopped in humans, nor can it.
Natural selection has all but stopped in humans because our social and technological arrangements have overwhelmed the old "Survival of the fittest" (and even the "preferrential reproduction of the fittest") mechanism by which biological evolution proceeds. Genetic drift and mutation of course will still happen but except at the extremes the winnowing mechanisms has been shut down. To the extent our genome changes in the future it is most likely going to be the result of our own deliberate, conscious manipulation, not random mutation filtered through any form of natural selection.
Re: It's also clear that people vary quite a bit in terms of how much they want children, even within a culture.
Of course. But it's wildly unlikley that this is a genetic trait, unless you wish to posit that the human mind is as ridigly preprogrammed and immutable as that of insects-- which we know not to be the case.
Re: When we invent an artificial womb, we'll be well on the way to overcoming one of the reasons why wealthy modern Western societies aren't reproducing at replacement levels.
The reason we are under-reproducing has very little to do with wombs, artificial or otherwise, and very, very much to do with economics and the fact that children have ceaased to be an economic plus for their families and are now an economic minus. Unless you can change that fact, most people will limit themselves to small families because they just can't afford large ones whatever their feelings on the matter. And again, this is NOT a losing evolutionary strategy, if we lavish resources on those few offspring so that they end up being more successful than their ancestors.
Comments closed April 01, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
True, but the tendency for upper middle class cultures to drop below replacement fertility rates is close to universal.
It might all change. The future is unwritten. But if we want below replacement fertility to change, we ought to be thinking about how to bring that change about, not just sitting back and letting stuff happen.
Posted by Steve Sailer | March 18, 2007 10:56 PM