Here is a slice of an opinion piece from USA Today:
What’s the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here’s one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.
This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It’s not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It’s that progressives are so much less likely to have children.
It’s a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future – one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families.
Today, fertility correlates strongly with a wide range of political, cultural and religious attitudes. In the USA, for example, 47% of people who attend church weekly say their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, 27% of those who seldom attend church want that many kids.
In Utah, where more than two-thirds of residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 92 children are born each year for every 1,000 women, the highest fertility rate in the nation. By contrast Vermont – the first to embrace gay unions – has the nation’s lowest rate, producing 51 children per 1,000 women.
I had read previously that Red States have growing populations and much more new school construction than Blue States. This piece does seem to be missing lots of facts though, like the fact that people with less (or no) children have more disposable income to give to their political candidates. It also needs to address growing minority populations that may not trend conservative. On top of that you can also talk about how even conservatives and other Republicans are prepared to pull a Dem or Independent lever come this November.
I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.
You probably want to check out the author of this. And his family.
Booman and I have already had a discussion of the many weaknesses in his brother’s arguments so I won’t bother repeating them here, especially since I can point you to Echidne of the Snakes excellent takedown.
This is Booman’s brother?
Ha, Can I step in it or what! And thanks for the link.
chuckle. My brother and I do not agree on everything. He’s free game. A quail, if you will.
But I do agree that progressives need to drop the idea that we have overpopulation and that small families are morally superior.
A healthy society produces enough children to replace itself. We are not doing that. The Europeans are really not doing that. And it has grace implications not only for the grand sweep of politics but for basic human services for the elderly.
that could be adopted.
Even if both US and Europe mandate by law that every female shall be bred every year from puberty to menopause, it will not affect the demographic shift.
The elderly will have to settle for services provided by the sons of immigrants.
adoption is a different topic.
At issue are two things. Secular people and progressives are reproducing a much lower rate than religious people and conservatives.
All other things being equal, this will lead to more people that hold religious and conservative views in the future, because on average, children hold the same or similar views as their parents on religion and politics.
More children of conservatives means more conservatives. This happened in the late Roman Empire when Christians outbred pagans at a very healthy clip for 300 years until the state made it legally advantageous to be a Christian and the religion took off from a cult similar to Mormanism to the monolith it became in Europe.
Secondly, Western societies more generally, as well as South Korea and Japan, are not replacing their own population, which means there are many less workers to retirees, and this is going to explode shortly when the Boomers retire. American is in a better position than most other western societies. But that is in large part because we are the most religious of western societies. But even we are not at replacement levels.
This causes generational inequity. It’s bad enough that we are deficit spending, because tomorrow’s children will work 3/4 of their day just to pay for retirees, and the rest of it to pay off our debt.
reproducing enough to affect the demographic shift.
There will be workers, but they will be immigrants and sons of immigrants.
The cultural effects you are worried about, those religious westerners becoming more numerous than secular ones, may well be a factor in the conflict, but in the larger view it is a minor factor.
I think you are wrong on this one. The religious reproduction rate is totally robust and is far higher than in today’s Iran, for just one example.
If you are interested in this you should take a look at my brother’s book to see the stats.
But here is a snippet from an article from last year
And wrote a reply, that somebody with skills can probably find. I don’t dispute that the religious people reproduce more, I am just saying that westerner vs. westerner conflicts are not going to be the major conflict. You will even see some of the secular ones join the religious ones against the immigrants.
you think we should completely drop it?
yeah. It’s not true. We have underpopulation.
The issue of depletion of resources is real. But it is not because we have too many people. The population of the United States is rising do to immigration. Without immigration it would be falling. And, while it doesn’t matter very much how big a given population is, each generation should as close to the same size as the last one.
We are about to enter into a period where instead of there being 12 workers per retiree as when we grew up, there will be 2 to 3 workers per retiree. This leads to overtaxation and the diversion of work into subsidizing old-age. It is not an economically sound demographic for a society to have.
My impression is that most progressives, when they talk about overpopulation, are talking about population on a worldwide level and not necessarily about population in the United States.
So when you say that we should “drop” this idea, I’m not sure that the idea you want to be dropped is actually much of an idea here anyway.
Here is the thing.
I don’t agree entirely with my brother’s conclusions, but his numbers don’t lie. Interpreting the numbers is open for all kinds of debate. But he is on to something.
Even though he didn’t say what we should do about it in his article, by the end of the day it will have made the rounds of many feminist blogs where it will be torn to shreds because of what it implies we should do.
I don’t think the answer is to take away abortion and contraceptives and to make stay at home mom friendly legislation. That is what the socially conservative want and what certain panicking white males want. We don’t want or need to go down that road to prevent a fundamentalist takeover (I mean that pretty much is a fundamentalist takeover).
But one thing we can do, is educate people about the issue of generational equity and get rid of the idea that having one or less babies is some kind of ecologically superior thing to do. It may have some negligible effect on the environment, but it has a far worse effect on the economy. It leads to poverty and low job growth.
I have no idea if his numbers lie or not because my recollection of reading his article a couple of weeks ago was that he did not provide much in the way of numbers (much less the methodology behind the numbers). So there can be no debate about interpretation of those numbers when the numbers aren’t there to debate.
You and your brother are entitled to your opinions. I didn’t get particularly worked up about his conclusions when I read it; I don’t read feminist blogs so I have no idea if they are ripping it apart. I thought it was an interesting opinion and certainly is entitled to be discussed. But since he drew such sweeping conclusions without any data to back them up, I treat them only as opinion.
I find it interesting that your brother segregates the world into secular/progressive and religious/conservative. I think that was a major flaw in his article. It doesn’t take into account the fact that religious people do not as a whole fall into the conservative camp (and liberal religious people don’t necessarily limit the number of children they have to one). More importantly, IMO, people (religious or not) can be conservative on some issues and progressive on others.
For the citations you might want on the statistics you can see his book: The Empty Cradle.
The polling was done to ascertain people’s feelings about issues and institutions, their church attendence, their voting patterns, then this was compared to census data, etc.
Simply put, the less you attend church, the more you vote on the left, the less respect you have for major insitutions like the government, the church, the armed forces, etc… the less children you have. And the opposite is true also.
As a demographer, my brother doesn’t look or care too much about the individual. I think it is a major shortcoming in his policy formulations because he is too willing to throw out personal liberties in order to obtain socially derirable results. You should see his health proposals. Creative, innovative, probably would work wonders, but would also totally eviscerate privacy laws.
What he is saying on patriarchy is actually kind of neutral. He is saying the more patriarchial a society is, the more children it will have. He isn’t saying that we should therefore be more patriarchial. But he is saying two important and uncomfortable things. One, that patriarchial ideas will prevail through the mere act of superior reproductive rates for those that have them. And two, that low birth rates have real consequences for the health of the economy and our ability to experience economic growth.
Now, I think his first point needs to be challenged, not because I think he it necessarily wrong, but because I think we need to know im nore depth what causes higher birth rates in Utah than Seattle than just attributing it to patriarchial values.
The thing I liked most about the article was that it might provoke discussion on an interesting topic.
An interesting topic to me is if a country like Italy that has a very low birth rate also has a very high standard of living. They don’t have a large immigrant population yet it seems to be very stable.