I’ve linked to it here and there today, but everyone should really read my brother’s new article in Foreign Policy. If you find it interesting you can buy his book: The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about It. If you would prefer to strangle him, I do know where he lives, and for a price…
Let me know what you think. And don’t be shy, I tell my bro exactly what I think…all the time.
I read the article earlier today and, as much as I dislike admitting it, there is more than a grain of truth in it. A society where the male is the primary source of income is one where women are more likely to be subjugated & have more children. I grew up in a time when the choices for a woman who wanted (or needed to work) were limited to shop-girl, waitress, hairdresser, secretary and teacher. Most of the girls I graduated from high school with were more interested in obtaining their MRS. than their BA. I went to college, graduated in 1965, taught school for 2½ years until I quit to await the birth of my first child. From then on, I was a stay at home mom, finding things (pcb assembly, machine tool control detailing, pcb design, computer programming) that I could do from my living room until my children (total of 2, zero population growth) were older. I quit at two children because I knew my marriage was doomed. Michigan’s No Fault divorce laws let me get out of a bad marriage – if I’d been trapped with more archaic restrictions or unable to obtain reliable birth control, I might have had more children or (heaven forbid) still in that marriage.
Since you seem quite anxious for feedback, my first comment is, “My goodness, Phillip is certainly a prolific writer” :^)
Seriously, I’ve really enjoyed his writing style thus far, but given the length of the essay, I needed to print it for complete viewing at a later time.
It appears that I haven’t yet arrived at any controversial issues, but, thus far, his observations seem to align with my own. By nature and beliefs, conservatives are more likely to produce higher numbers of offspring than liberals.
Having not read the essay beyond the first few paragraphs, I have to agree with at least that point. My conservative friends – most of whom are Mormon and Catholic, have very large families, with a great deal more children than my liberal friends.
Then again . . . who’s to say that the offspring of the conservatives will follow in the footsteps of their parents in value systems, religion, politics, etc.
Just felt like submitting a response to your inquiry (however incomplete the response may be).
Good night -A-
I liked it, but I’m not going to buy the book–I’ll wait for the movie!
And there is more on Medicare D(iaster) and Political Posturing…specifically, all that has been said, and what the implied solutions are to this mess–that is fixing the damn thing–as if it can be.
The other comments cover it pretty well- Phillip has made a(nother) astute observation. I didn’t see (not having read the fine print) any serious (read scary) public policy proposals based on the observation- but as a warning to those who might make such proposals- an understanding of how society does work should never be mistaken for an insight into how society should work. Some guy named Marx made that mistake and a whole lot of people wound up dead because of it.
Given that Phillip is quite aware of that little pitfall, I’m not worried- now can we get him to write an article about how allowing unlimited skills based immigration would solve any future problems with Social Security. (I mean, if we need another 50 million Americans would you rather get them (most likely via a pit stop in Child Protective Services) from an overlarge family of dedicated irrationalists- or just let in a bunch of 25 year old physics PhD’s.
I enjoyed reading the article. I do think he has a great point on the population control factor and its untoward affects. Well, Booman, he got published and that is a lot more than I have gotten…:o)
I have spent way too much time here tonight. I have to get some work for the company done and finished before tomorrow.
I do like how your sibling writes. I used to read foreign policy a lot..do not know why I stopped. :o( Just too much reading sometimes, I suppose.
It scared the crap out of me. The thing about conservative families having more children and then controlling the country. We’re doomed.
Your brother is very insightful Booman.
The self-aware and ambitious conservative pursues a lifestyle that requires the labor and suffering of a lot of poor people to maintain. so if the population starts to decline the conservatives will also start procreating less because they won’t want to accelerate the deterioration of their lifestyle by spending more money raising children they don’t really need anyway.
To me the “falling populaton favors conservatives” doesn’t wash at all.
Even Bill Maher was raised Catholic and look at what has happened to him.
Heh, I was raised Catholic and look what happened to me. Of four brothers two Democrats, one republican and one can’t be pinned down.
I think his argument is just a rehashing of the Malthusian panic of a century or so ago — only framed not around social class but around political ideology.
I also dispute his assertion that patriarchy ever went away enough to stage a “comeback.”
I’d write more, but this political liberal has to put her offspring to bed.
Maybe I shouldn’t watch NOW on PBS while reading magazine articles online – but I didn’t quite see the connection between the dwindling sizes of families in western and evolving nations vs. poorer, less educated populations and their relationship to patriarchal/conservative societies.
Women, in the countries mentioned, are having fewer children because they’re working and are overloaded – that doesn’t have much to do with the fact that most countries and populations are patriarchal and have been for a long, long time.
Please enlighten me (I’m a girl).
Also – how does patriarchal necessarily = conservative?
While I don’t dispute the dynamics of Patriarchy, (or even Matriarchy in those ancient societies that preceeded the “Common Era”, [or the “Abrahamic Era”]), I do disagree completely as to the view that such population growth as your bro seems to be advocating is beneficial either practically or philosophically.
For me, because we have enshrined societal constructs where those who come after have a disproportionate burden placed on them to support their/our forbearers, we’ve created a dependency from which their is no way to extricate ourselves. It’s like a catch 22; we need ever more new births in order to have the productive bodies to pay off the debt and expenses created by the previous generations, and the more of these births we have, the more debt we create and the more new bodies we need ad infinitum.
I’m not suggesting we do away with the sort of programs that do work effectively in transgenerational ways, but I am saying that we need to control the systems for daily living so that they are sustainable in their own time, rather than shuffling off such a disproportionate amount of the debt onto the children we bear.
I’m not a scholar on this topic, and not particularly well-read on it either, but it seems to me that I’ve not read anyone anywhere ever raising this fundamental point about this sort of dependency creating the very problem it’s widely seen as supposed to be solving.
When was the last time he got laid? Is this the Einstein looking bro that I met in D.C.? If so, he really needs someone to take those locks for a tussle! I myself prescribe to the Bullworth theory……you know…..Senator Bullworth. We all just need to keep fuckin each other until we are all the same color…….problems solved!
MT – Bullworth and his advice often cross my mind as I read different diaries.
I am filled with hope whenever I get to read wedding announcements, such as, “Jennifer Wong weds Liam Goldberg.”
thesis is ridiculous; it’s ideology dressed up as scholarship. I see lots of generalizations, but what are they based on? has he actually studied ancient Rome? classical Athens? early Mesopotamia? aboriginal societies? indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest? and found some sort of correlation between family structure and prosperity? I don’t see any evidence he’s actually studied the details of the ancient civilizations. I’ll agree if family structure gives men complete control over wives and takes away birth control, and all women are under the control of father or husband, they will have more children (it didn’t work for Imperial Rome, however, despite laws and a pro-repoduction ideology, roman upper classes had a low birth rate. but high birth rate doesn’t necessarily correlate with prosperity. geography (climate and natural resources) are a big factor. furthermore, high birthrate in the ancient world was very much about trying to cancel outthe effects of high infant mortality and absence of reliable birth control. too much to address here, but I gues my main point is that a postindustrial society is not the same as a preindustrial agrarian based society. Maybe he didn’t notice we’ve spent the past 150 years mechanizing most economic processes. A recommended corrective – Jared Diamond’s Collapse. It’s not clear that our civ won’t go the way of the (prosperous) ancient Maya and Anasazi. Or, to take his issues, how about a comparative study about parental involvement and concern for future generations between small and large families, ok, i’ve vented. i’ll go reread it to see if i’m overreacting and apologize if i’m being unfair.
p.s.- is he really your brother? my conclusion is you inherited the brains of the family.
Interestingly, part of the inability of Augustus to restore patriarchal values in ancient Rome may have been because Roman women had access to an herbal form of effective birth control, the abortifacient plant silphium, a member of the celery, fennel and carrot family of plants (illustrations on ancient coins). Think of it as Roman RU-486. Of course, demand drove the price high enough that poor women could no longer afford it, and had to resort to the time-honored method of letting unwanted or unaffordable children die of exposure. Demand also led to over-collection (it only grew in a limited area in what is today Libya) and extinction by the time of Nero.
The shape of the seeds of the silphium plant are thought by some to be the origin of the heart-shape for our symbol for love (the symbol actually doesn’t resemble a heart all that closely).
comment 2: my central, non-venting, question – what’s wrong with a falling birthrate? does he really think humans are going to die out? is he suggesting there are not enough workers for our economies? we’re still a long way from drop in worldwide population. and i think he missed the point of the Roman quote. and limiting family size can contribute to accumulation of wealth over generations because it’s divided fewer ways in subsequent generations, so todays patriarchal families with lots of children may find themselves relegated to the lower rungs of the social order in a few generations, with the upper echelons occupied by gay couples and egalitarian heterosexual couples with 1 or 2 children. just a thought. (how many children does Anne Armstrong – Texas ranch lady- have? George W. Bush? whatever one wants to say about his policies, his marriage looks fairly egalitarian to me)
See, I can sum up really long articles in a few words. I’ve been practicing.
BooMan, this piece gives me some insight into you. I confess I have wondered about your tolerance for a brevity-impaired individual who disagrees with you on pretty much everything.
Now I know. It is a gift you received from your family life.
I have seen plenty of articles that attempt to politely address the writer’s not unpredicatble concern that the demographic sector from which he hails is currently at around 14% and dropping worldwide, however I don’t know if I have seen it “framed” in quite this way, and I commend your brother on his originality.
To concentrate on his patriarchy point as opposed to the “endangered white folks” aspect, it is not patriarchy, or the subjugation of women, that is the largest factor in high versus low birthrate.
Any people who is “endangered” in the sense of food insecurity, famine, war (or something like it) etc. will have a higher birthrate. This has not to do with patriarchy but the instinct of specied preservation.
This is why women in sub-Saharan Africa have an average of a squillion children, in contrast to their sisters in Norway, who have one, if they are feeling especially fecund.
Subjugation of women can play a role, obviously, but the role it plays is more of a lesser version of famine, war, etc.
Subjugated women will tend to be less food secure, less safe from violence, and whether their principal value is as a producer of sons (as in the East, and no, this is NOT limited to Muslim populations, ask any Hindu sonogram clinic owner in India) or as an object of sexual desire, as in the West.
Therefore, they will be likely to have more children per uterus than their equally subjugated but more affluent sisters.
In the US, birthrates will be higher among ladies who are poor, regardless of ethnicity, and the same is true of wealthy daughters of the east.
And more affluent women may escape some aspects of whatever subjugation model they experience. They are more likely to have formal education, and thus even only in theory, economic empowerment, the twin lodestones of subjugation.
This oppression of women is not due to mysogyny or any religion, or even any culture.It’s about social control, which means economic control, which means it’s about the money.
Subjugation of women is the most effective and time-tested method of social control known to man.
Literate mothers teach their kids to read. Economically empowered mothers are more likely than their brothers, husbands, or babydaddys to spend their money on things that will benefit their families and communities.
I apologize to my brothers for the sexism, but it is a fact that we are more likely to spend our money on things that will help the king. For instance, weapons, so that we can go and seize the gold of other villages to enrich our king’s coffers, hoping that he will give us a coin for our efforts.
Meanwhile, if our wives have any money, while we are gone, they will have dug several wells, set up an irrigation system and a communal day care and fruit-drying operation, and sold dried fruit to the women of the other village, who will use some to get them through the fruitless winter, and figured out a way to make some new and improved garden tool with the hardest and driest pieces, which they are now selling to the women in yet another village, etc.
On our return from making the king richer, we are likely to discover that our coin is not as pleasing to our lady, nor does it purchase much that we would want at home or in the neighboring village because nobody has made any dried fruit into weapons, and our wife has just come from a meeting where it was decided that the village will secede from the kingdom, since they don’t really need the king any more, and they already spent all the gold to pay a band of nomads to build a school, so he has no reason to care whether they secede or not, as the nomads are long gone.
My only hope of making my village, and therefore me, of interest enough to the king so that he might consider giving me another coin, is if I can somehow turn the women themselves into a commodity…
Was this brief? I just stopped, I could keep going.
Interesting essay, but I don’t see the reason for alarm. Who says that a decline in population is a bad thing? The rate that we’re going now there’s bound to be a correction, regardless what symptom of overpopulation is evidenced: disease, famine, war, etc. It would obviously be preferable if people would adopt progressive policies and avoid that kind of tragedy. But we will get to that point eventually, if we mange not to kill ourselves off first. Smile and use a condom.
I said it briefly in the other thread on this, but I’ll repeat myself and clarify a bit. First of all Boo, I realize your brother isn’t you so anything I’m saying here reflects on him only.
I bitterly disagree with the fundamental concepts of the New America Foundation, of which he is a “fellow”.
Secondly there are matriarchal societies still in existance on this earth, including the Tyrgh peoples right there in the good old USA, not to mention the Juchitan of Mexico, the Sierra Juarez Zapotecs of Oaxaca, the Kuna peoples of Panama and the Shipiho of the Upper Amazon. I don’t think their birth rates correspond with his theory at all.
As the population as a whole, it continues to grow. So long as world food population continues to grow, so does world human population. I know that statement somehow offends people but it is quite true nonetheless.
See here for more on that.
Pax
Yesterday in the open thread I said:
“I certainly find the implications of his article disturbing, but I’m going to have to give it some thought as to whether the scenario he poses is typical, inevitable, just one small piece of the puzzle, or what.”
Having slept on it, I’m back. Actually, I got up at 3AM for “some other purpose,” and found all kinds of ideas about this coming to me.
The verdict? He’s got just one piece of the puzzle; a snapshot of a larger and more complex process from a certain angle at a certain moment in time. From that angle and at that moment what he says is true, but let me pull the camera back a bit…
Consider a small country “at equilibrium” in terms of income and population, and think about what happens if there is some change that results in a slug of income hitting the country – a new trade route opens, a new vein of ore is discovered, a new, exportable product is developed (even something as bizarre as hybrid tulips in Holland, although I think the small Italian city-states of the Renaissance are a better example). There is a generation that works hard, plays by the rules, and makes a better life for their children as a result of this change. The children bootstrap themselves even higher. Maybe by the third generation, there’s a class of folks that are well off, better educated, better fed, and which have other interests than the hard work of raising kids – and the scenario described by your brother kicks in, the wealth peters out, the moment of glory is over, with some castles, tapestries and paintings left to show for it, to use in 300 years to draw in the tourists. The rise and fall of the Spanish empire might even fit Phillip’s scenario, written large, although certainly there were other factors like the effects of inflation from the vast amounts of looted American gold and the military disaster of the Spanish Armada at work as well.
But when you look at a country like America today, you have a much more complex situation. You have a case far from any kind of equilibrium – there are constantly new discoveries being made which might prove to be new sources of wealth, waves of immigrants reaching our shores, the interaction of these factors with the internal dynamic of the society as a whole and its intergenerational trends (as described by Strauss and Howe), the random arrival of pandemics, disasters, foreign attack, etc.
Allowing for all that complexity, let’s take a look at one aspect, the effect of waves of immigration, in preventing the ossification of a culture into a conservative patriarchy as described by Phillip. Each new wave of immigrants, whether considered over the arc of individual families or for social groups as a whole, traces the same cycle of rise and fall as described in the article. As a result, at any given time America is a mix of conservative and liberal elements in competition for political dominance.
Andrew Carnegie famously described this process as “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”
Look at the historical experience of any given ethnic immigrant group, and you see the pattern repeat – in my own family, the ditch digger’s sons became factory foremen, whose sons went to college to become things like computer programmers, whose children’s fate is yet to be determined, but who are the first to have the opportunity to think about things like art and politics without “the wolf at the door” – and who as a result have a greater risk of falling prey to the wolf.
When my parents grew up, the stereotype was that Eastern European Jewish people, for example, were small businessmen. When I grew up the stereotype was that they were doctors and scientists, and Asian people were small businessmen. Today’s stereotype is that Asian students outperform everyone else, Moslem-Americans operate convenience stores, and South Asians are hoteliers.
To get a clear-cut cycle like this, the families of a specific ethnic heritage all have to arrive in a relatively short period together, so that each family is going through this process in synchrony with their fellow immigrants. The reason we see only a wave crashing on the shore and not repeated cycles is that the unique circumstances of each family cause the synchrony in family cycles to break down around the time Carnegie’s observation comes to pass. The immigrant families’ trajectories through American culture become indistinguishable from American society as a whole. The ethnic group has assimilated (or been assimilated. Kinda like the Borg.).
I’d say that point is where, for instance, Jewish-Americans and Italian-Americans are today. In fact, a good barometer of when assimilation is nearing completion is when the ethnic group ends up with a member on the Supreme Court, in some governorships, or nominated for vice-president.
The special and tragic circumstances of African-Americans coming to America, and of the experience of Native Americans, have made them exceptions to this paradigm as an ethnic cohort, of course. But even for specific families in these groups, I’d be surprised if Carnegie’s dictum was totally void, as all human nature is the same.
So waves of immigration are one force at work to keep the culture vital, energized with their dreams and work, and far from the equilibrium that leads to the cultural stagnation that we would see under Phillip’s scenario.
Another such force is education. Another is technological innovation. Another is the discovery of new resources, or ways to make resources go further. All these act as “slugs of wealth” into the society (one can almost diagram it in terms of flows of matter, energy, and-or information, as Odum did for ecosystems) that allow at least some members of society to go through Carnegie’s cycle. And as long as there’s “convection” for families in the “melting pot” (it doesn’t need to be the full boil of a gilded age, just some rising and falling will do) there will be a liberal intelligentia raging against the dying of the light and the forces of social ossification.
There still will be disasters and epidemics to deal with as well, to keep things far from stagnant, of course.
The thesis I’ve described helps make sense of both the religious and immigration policies of the American right, which gives me hope both that I might be on to something, and also that the (non-)immigration policies of the right will ultimately be rejected by American society for that old “bottom-line” reason, it will cost every American money.
Heh. Well, Boo, lemme tell yuh a story . . .
Bill Bulger was the state senator from South Boston to the Massachusetts Senate for many years. For awhile, as President of that senate, he was thought to be the most powerful person in the state. It was said that Mike Dukakis and Ted Kennedy alike were terrified of him. “Billy” graduated from the venerable Boston College High School twelve years before I did.
Bill’s brother Frank graduated from “Southie”. He was also pretty powerful, but as the leader of a rather nasty faction of the Irish Mafia known as The Winter Hill Gang. For a period of time, Frank’s folks exchanged dead bodies and spent lead with cohorts of Ray Patriarca and the New England Cosa Nostra, based mostly in Providence, RI, in an attempt to control dope and the rackets between Nashua and Hartford.
The night before he was scheduled to finally get popped by the Boston FBI for multiple counts of murder and similar mayhem, someone whispered in Frank’s ear and he made like a ghost. That was years ago. There have, since then, been Elvis-like sightings of Frank Bulger in places like Belgium, but nobody’s caught him.
Finally retiring from the Massachusetts senate, Bill Bulger’s next gig was as president of the University of Massachusetts system. After awhile, in addition to some alledged “irregularities” in his official tenure, his brother’s “situation” started to raise some questions. He was called before a congressional committee at one point, I believe, but demurred for the most part.
Ever the epitome of the cultured Irish gentleman, when asked by a reporter once how his brother’s shenanigans effected him, Bill replied simply and with a sad smile, “He’s my brotha . . . and I love him.”