In looking for material for a piece I’m thinking of writing about Rick Perlstein’s Outlook article, I ran across an interesting Hoover Institution review of my brother’s book The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do about It.
Considering how much I disagree with my brother about politics, and also how defensive I am about people that criticize him, it certainly is fascinating to read a right-wing think tank like the Hoover Institute say the following:
In The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman takes a different view. Longman believes that runaway population decline may be halted, yet he understands that this can be accomplished only by way of fundamental cultural change. The emerging demographic crisis will call a wide range of postmodern ideologies into question. Longman writes as a secular liberal looking for ways to stabilize the population short of the traditionalist, religious renewal he fears the new demography will bring in its wake.
Given the roots of population decline in the core characteristics of postmodern life, Longman understands that the endless downward spiral cannot be reversed without a major social transformation. As he puts it, “If human population does not wither away in the future, it will be because of a mutation in human culture.” Longman draws parallels to the Victorian era and other periods when fears of population decline, cultural decadence, and fraying social safety nets intensified family solidarity and stigmatized abortion and birth control. Longman also notes that movements of the 1960s, such as feminism, environmentalism, and the sexual revolution, were buttressed by fears of a population explosion. Once it becomes evident that our real problem is the failure to reproduce, these movements and attitudes could weaken.
Longman’s greatest fear is a revival of fundamentalism, which he defines broadly as any movement that relies on ancient myth and legend, whether religious or not, “to oppose modern, liberal, and commercial values.” Religious traditionalists tend to have large families (relatively speaking). Secular modernists do not. Longman’s fear is that, over time, Western secular liberals will shrink as a portion of world population while, at home and abroad, traditionalists will flourish. To counter this, and to solve the larger demographic-economic crisis, Longman offers some very thoughtful proposals for encouraging Americans to have more children. Substantial tax relief for parents is the foundation of his plan.
Longman has thought this problem through very deeply. Yet, in some respects, his concerns seem odd and exaggerated. He lumps American evangelicals together with Nazis, racists, and Islamicists in the same supposed opposition to all things modern. This is more interesting as a specimen of liberal prejudice than as a balanced assessment of the relationship between Christianity and modernity. Moreover, the mere fact that religious conservatives have more children than secular liberals is no guarantee that those children will remain untouched by secular culture.
Still, Longman rightly sees that population decline cannot be reversed in the absence of major cultural change, and the prospects of a significant religious revival must not be dismissed. In a future shadowed by vastly disproportionate numbers of poor elderly citizens, and younger workers struggling with impossible tax burdens, the fundamental tenets of postmodern life might be called into question. Some will surely argue from a religious perspective that mankind, having discarded God’s injunctions to be fruitful and multiply, is suffering the consequences.
If ever there was a thinker that knew how to piss off (and challenge the established worldview of) left-leaning Baby Boomers, it’s my brother. Yet, he cannot be merely dismissed. As always, I solicit your feedback.
Hell, runaway population decline is probably the only thing that might save the planet. Bring it on! Knock it back by 4/5 or so.
lemme guess, you’re a boomer?
lemme guess, you’re living in a cocoon.
BooMan, your bro is up against the shadow government people (Kissinger types) who are intent on population control.
On the other hand, there are provincial governments in Canada, as an example, that reward the birth of a child…baby bonuses in the 4 figures plus monthly child support also covered by universal health care, single payer, to keep their population stable.
I don’t understand your rejoiner. How is wanting a lower human population in order to make less of an impact on our planet a tell-tale trait of a boomer?
It just is.
It’s not restricted to Boomers though, people are so used to worrying about overpopulation that they just can’t seem to accept that underpopulation is the biggest looming threat of the 21st century.
Here’s a (.pdf) with charts, to help make the point.
Here’s a basic explanation of the phenomenon:
The reason Boomers get picked on is because they are the ones most personally invested in the idea that overpopulation is a problem, that smaller families are somehow virtuous, etc. It’s tied into the narratives of some of the most important movements of the Boomer generation, especially environmentalism and feminism. Younger people share some misconceptions about demographic trends and basic intergenerational economics, but they don’t share the same personal investment in not getting the point about the greater threat of population decline.
Ironically, even as my brother violates some of the sacred cows of the environmental and feminist movements (sometimes in ways I find personally offensive), his main concern is that we’ll lose those battles and all the rest to a rising tide of know-nothing fundamentalists.
African, India and China need more people?
I think population growth coupled with increased consumption is THE problem. And I’m older than a boomer. And a population biologist (not people).
But I guess I missed his point.
I think the problem is two fold: there are already many, too many humans to be sustainable without ‘mutation’ of human society AND we are not reproducing fast enough to maintain our economic model. There is therefor a two-fold approach to mitigating these issues. Apparently ‘mutation’ helps with the slowing growth thing, but it doesn’t seem to address the former point. I’ve actually thought about this a lot and have come to only one solution that can take care of all of this.
Problem is, it is hilarious:
Make small sexy. Promote reproduction, sure, but make minuscule stature the ideal trait. The smaller the people, the less resources they require and the less individual habitat, allowing for nature to return to more corners of the world, or at least slow our impact a bit.
How do you make small sexy? Well, advertising and regulation, of course! A good marketing scheme can provide the cawwot and a good cap and trade scheme, the stick: Like carbon cap and trade proposals, we need as broad as possible array of such regulated resource consumption ‘sticks’. Smaller people will have a natural advantage and such a system would naturally give preference to the small, save the world and prevent the need for more draconian methods.
How would you rather save the world from the two headed evil of overpopulation and negative socio-economic change? War? Disease? Manipulating Nature even more?
Personally I think we have a better chance screwing our way to a solution than thinking our way out. I don’t know if you’ve notice, it’s a lot easier to get people to do the nasty that it is to take political action.
the first step to recovery is realizing that population growth is about to cease, reverse, and plummet at a tremendous rate. Our problem is not that there are too many people.
Addressing half the problem by ignoring it away, the other will give you half the result you want.
What more evidence would you need that we’ve already simply eliminated to0 much ‘natural’ habitat by over population? I can count the number of unpolluted bodies of water in the US with both hands chopped off and we have plenty of ‘wide-open’ space. But I guess we should ignore that so that capitalist economic expansion can continue to primarily benefit an elite?
Mini-people, my man. Mini. people.
BRING BACK THE WELFARE QUEEN!! She was saving the world.
that the problem is a shrinking population base. I see
1. too many people with too many conflicts.
It seems that every third country wants to split upon some kind of arbitrary line and genocide the perceived “other”. When rats become too crowded they start fighting – is it possible that is where we are?
2. The only model for not enough people is the pyramid schemes upon which we have based retirement options. The scheme depends upon more and more people entering into the work force to pay for those retiring. But this could be countered in many ways. Not least of which is allowing more liberal rules about retirees working. When they work, they pay taxes etc. People who lose jobs 50 and older should get some kind of subsidy that will enable them to survive until they get work or to subsidize them through minimum wage, if that is all they can find (minimum wage is not livable wage which might be the first thing we should fix!) Taxes could also be taken at higher salary levels than currently done which would be a quick fix without impoverishing somebody.
3. The consumerism model is not sustainable. We need to figure out how we can have work that doesn’t pollute, doesn’t run us out of earth. We haven’t really done that bit as yet and it is REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT THAT WE DO IT FAST! The consumerism model also relies on more and more and more people.
And yet he’s essentially correct. The only way for Christianity to coexist with a free, open, modern society is for Christians to abandon much of the Bible. (You could fairly argue that jettisoning the Pauline additions to the core doctrines of the Gospels removes much of the problem, but that is unlikely to ever be a widespread view, and it is only partially true in any event.) The relationship of Christianity to modernity is only peaceful at present because the power of the church is in abeyance; if the major institutions of Christendom could launch a frontal assault against modernity, they would be no more reluctant or reserved than their Islamic counterparts.
I don’t, however, think that the solution is to encourage agnostic liberals to have more children. I don’t know anyone who would respond favorably to such a suggestion, much less the sliding scale of official incentives and disincentives that would range from gentle nudges to actual coercion. Most likely, it would only encourage the fundamentalists to breed still more rapidly.
The problem, as stated, isn’t so much declining population levels as the constant background threat of a religious renaissance. Breeding is not going to counter religion. Instead, the “mutation” that our society requires is a change in popular and official attitudes to religion, abandoning enthusiastic tolerance in favor of bare tolerance. That means finally dismantling all of the official structures that actively encourage religion. The two most important are the tax-exempt status of religious organization and official recognition of religious marriages. Starve organized religion of its enormous, ill-gotten cashflow and substitute civil unions for official recognition of what is actually very specific — and essentially unconstitutional — recognition of Jewish and Christian religious law, and much of the power of religion in society will decline steeply. Federalizing the educational system and mandating the primacy of scientific fact over religious superstition would also be another gigantic step towards a post-religious society.
I would personally go much further, further even than the laudable French policy of Laïcité, and actually prohibit the public display of religion altogether while permitting, with official condescension and moderate suspicion, the private practice of religion without any interference. I realize that is presently an unrealistic goal while so many leftists are still attached to the belief that organized dogmatic religion can sustain a healthy coexistence with a free society, a belief that is frankly unsupported by history. But we are scarcely two centuries into an unprecedented era of religious freedom, and it will undoubtedly take some time before the myth of religion as a repository of virtue and wisdom is generally repudiated.
and we totally missed the point. As we reduced our numbers of children, we spoiled the ones we have. If three children share and recycle, they may have a smaller ecological footprint than a single child who’s spoiled rotten.
We all need to talk about less impact on the Earth, rather than counting heads.
I must admit that when you first posted about your brother and his book, some months ago, I went around for days saying, “This guy is BooMan’s BROTHER? WTF?” I didn’t respond on that thread.
A couple weeks ago I read his Amazon reviews, and had a repeat of the above disconnect. Your logic and thought are not only more solid, you are far more perceptive. (Take that to Thanksgiving dinner!)
I think what your brother is missing is the concept that liberals are made not by crotches but by education. If he’s worried about losing liberals then he should advocate for more University funding for the liberal arts.
If he’s confused about that then send him my way for clarification. I’d be happy to fill him in on my take on his call for more liberal women to bear children for the state. Just to be on the safe side, what’s his blood type?
The Hoover Institute review is perceptive enough to acknowledge that my brother tackles this problem from a secular liberal point of view (albeit, an unorthodox one).
My brother cannot be understood unless you are first willing to consider two of his premises.
Almost all of the criticism I hear of his work focuses on denying one, or both, of these premises.
You do it here by suggesting all his research is for naught, because better education can overwhelm religious upbringing (and then brushing aside the other evidence that supports his case).
It’s certainly your right to dismiss his premises s, but I have looked carefully at them and I cannot dismiss them. I question his solutions either because, in some cases, I don’t think they will work, or, in other cases, because I think they are self-defeating. We cannot, for example, overcome cultural conservatives by adopting some of their policies (which, in places, my brother advocates).
But my differences about solutions don’t help matters much, because I have none to replace his. I think it is fairly certain that we will see an a major resurgence of fundatmentalist-inspired and demographic/economic-driven patriarchy. And those societies that don’t move in that direction are likely to wane in influence over time (measure in half-centuries or centuries).
But I’ll be sure to mention you compliment at the next family get-together.
His first premise is highly questionable. What is behind it besides just an assertion? Why exactly can it not be dismissed outright? Where is the evidence?
Families with larger numbers of children will produce children who have more influence. This premise depends on the assumption that children will predominantly come from cultural conservative families, and the assumption that the children will emulate the values of their parents with no rebellion. Better education is not the only factor that might work against certain forms of cultural conservatism.
Finally, the context of the assertions are ambivalent. If the context is limited to the United States, then factoring in immigration undercuts the idea that large families are inevitably cultural conservatives.
More than anything else, this sounds like “secular liberal” fear of white fundamentalist, nationalist evangelical fear. Although loudmouthed, the white fundamentalist, nationalist evangelicals are a small minority whose time in power is rapidly passing. Too many are figuring out that they have been politically used.
the evidence is in his books and papers through years of research, and I provided you with a graph-rich .pdf of a presentation he did in 2004.
He addresses all the issues you raised.
Also, I’d note, that the current immigrant profile of the United States is much more culturally conservative than the nation as a whole, especially on matters of reproduction and reproductive habits.
That’s precisely why we have the highest fertility rate in the industrialized world.
I think population decline will come because of reduced capacity to sustain such a high global population. Overshoot seems inevitable.
Your brother seems to be talking all economics and little biology. I have a hard time taking him too seriously.
If anything, the political problem is neither population decline nor growth — it’s an insufficient pace of urbanization. Fundamentalism is the product of isolation in the hinterlands. Highly mobile urban populations — with the attendant breakdown of the extended family and loss of cultural homogeny — tend towards liberal secularism. That leaves our two problem populations: suburban sprawl and the rural remnant.
Suburban sprawl will solve itself when the petroleum that makes it possible runs dry. The rural remnant exists only because we continue to subsidize it as some kind of quaint museum of the American past. Cut the farm subsidies, and it will collapse with astonishing speed as people are obliged to move to the cities to find work.
Eventually it will come down simply to a question of who and what will survive. When one portion of our species, perhaps our portion, whithers and is not reproduced, the arguments that we bring to the society become mute and of course society (at least my view of it) is certainly weakened.
Though I’m not one of those that believes Star Trek was filmed on location, I do always enjoy the window sci-fi writers give us into our place.
Does anyone remember the Philip Wylie books written in the ’50’s. ‘The Disappearance’ – where one morning all the women woke up and the men were all gone; as simultaneously all the men woke up and the men were gone – and how each dealt with their new world? It just doesn’t work.
now compare to per capita grain consumption [Note: the timeline is different!]
There is an old diary on ET (closed for comments) discussing these charts and the affect of Peak Oil.)
An additional factor that needs to be considered is the switch of crop land from human food to biofuel production. The exact impact of this has yet to be determined but it will have an adverse affect on the poorest of the world’s population.
As important as the lack of grain is the lack of protein. H5N1 has wiped-out the poultry flocks of Asia and there just isn’t any other source. The world’s fish stocks, for example, have either collapsed (cod) or are max’ed out. An increase in beef, pork, lamb, and etc production would compete with humans as, again, the land can only produce X amount of food per acre at a given level of technology.
Last, Peak Oil is already increasing the cost to farmers. In some cases, fertilizer, petro-chemical inputs are unavailable. Generally, hard red winter wheat – Bread wheat – receives a top-dressing of fertilizer during April or May, depending on the area. If a farmer has not already purchased fertilizer there isn’t any. Without this we can confidently expect a decrease in US wheat production in the 2007-2008 growing season. How much? Who knows. It’s too early to even speculate.
Given the previous, de-population is inevitable.
It is possible for a breakthrough in agricultural technology to remedy the situation, for a while. This breakthrough would have to be on the order of Dwarf Wheat to make a substantial difference. Given the Ag Companies determination to milk every cent they can from their products it is to be expected new cultivars will be priced beyond the means of subsistence farmers; the price of petro-chemical inputs genetically modified plants require these cultivars are already outside of their financial reach. This implies even a dramatic breakthrough will have little to no impact.
Summarizing, the world’s food production has maximized. The world’s population is increasing. There is no more slack in the system. The world’s population WILL, eventually, decrease to met the available food supply.
Not to mention future water difficulties.
What runaway population decline?
Where? Have you looked at the birth rate statistics for the past couple of years in the US?
It’s not here yet, it’s built into the current reproductive practices of the industrialized world.
.pdf
So this argument assumes that (1) a smaller population is a bad thing and (2) the anxiety is rooted in the reproductive practices of white folks in North America and Europe.
no, it explains why generational inequity (in overall size) is undesirable, especially a small generation replacing a large and aging population.
It details the myriad ways in which population decline does, or can, have deleterious effects on society.
It explains that societies react to bad economic times (in a modern economy) by having smaller families.
It explains that there is a statistical relationship between a child’s religious and reproductive habits and those of his or her parents, and that when demographically charted over time, a society in which seculars have 1.5 children and cultural conservatives have 4 children, the society will grow much more culturally conservative.
It explains that in previous periods of population decline, societies have reacted by jacking up patriarchal methods of control (and, thus, restoring fertility).
And much more.
It’s not idle speculation. If you are interested in it, check it out and then critique it.
Seems to me that economic incentive or lack of it is a major force in influencing population trends. It would appear that having more children (in the industrialized west)creates an overwhelming economic burden that young couples are avoiding by having fewer or none at all. Perhaps a shrinking population will change this dynamic back the other way. When my 93 year old Mother was born in the South, many families had many kids. Kids worked in the fields and were an economic asset. Henry Ford changed that for the next generation(s). As the world population approaches seven billion, it is hard to imagine underpopulation being a concern, but I could see an accordion effect occurring as the boomers fade from the scene. However I think it is highly plausible that catastrophic events could cause an extremely rapid reverse of population growth. Pandemics, WMD wars, things of that nature may shrink our numbers to dangerously small levels.
It is interesting that all of the projections of age composition stop exactly at the point at which the boomer cohort is at its oldest and largest. If what he says is true, thereafter the number of elders starts to increase in absolute terms. But the number of children is not yet knowable because it depends on the response to his argument or on other factors that could create another baby boom. Indeed there are current reports of just such a baby boom emerging in the US for data for 2006 and 2007. How accurately that data in forecasting a trend remains to be seen.
It is instructive to understand how the baby boom in the US happened in the first place. Because it was not just a matter of better healthcare. Prior to World War II, there was much handwringing in Europe and the US. World War I had reduced the number of men in the population and families were reluctant to have children during the Depression. World War II had the effect of delaying the childbearing years of many people by five years. Then the prosperity of the 1950s made people feel economically secure enough to have families, but smaller than their parents’ families because the expectation that more would survive and the realization that more children would not help economically because there were fewer economic productive chores that children could do as compared when farm labor was the primary form of production.
The central contradiction that the presentation points out is the familiar one that the number of productive people per dependent elderly is decreasing.
The two policy directions from that is to make the young more productive quicker and to keep the elderly productive as long as possible. Making the young more productive quicker means an earlier transition into the workforce at the same time that education continues. To do this requires an economy that has less of a burden of wars–past, present, and future. And has more engagement in a variety of publicly and privately funded careers that actually do something instead of just going through the motions. And this points not to a failure of fertility but to a failure in the creativity and management of institutions.
What we know about aging is that activity promotes productivity among the elderly and inactivity accelerates decline and dependency. That argues for a reorganization of work instead of holding the geezer’s noses to the same grindstone for an additional 5, 10, 20 years.
That also argues for returning Social Security to it original function of being an economic supplement. One way of doing that is to eliminate the cap on earned income and the recapture of benefits on a 50% basis.
Eight billion is still a heavy load for the world’s resources.
From your link: “Capitalism is, historically speaking, a relatively new contraption, but recent experience suggests that capitalism and falling populations don’t mix particularly well.”
As stated in this thread, falling food production, water problems, climatic changes, peak oil… perhaps the problem is more the nature of the global economy. The Story of Stuff describes current practices with some astounding numbers.