Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, is the latest to jump on the “we’re not having enough babies” bandwagon with a book published last year, The Empty Cradle and an extended essay presenting his views on Foreign Affairs, “The Global Baby Bust.”
Longman repeats the litany of facts that most readers of this site are already familiar with. Worldwide total fertility rates are plunging, and the end of this century is likely to see a relatively old population with fewer young people as a percentage of the population than at anytime in human history. He writes,
In the United States, the direct cost of raising a middle-class child born this year through age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture, exceeds $200,000 — not including college. And the cost in forgone wages can easily exceed $1 million, even for families with modest earning power. Meanwhile, although Social Security and private pension plans depend critically on the human capital created by parents, they offer the same benefits, and often more, to those who avoid the burdens of raising a family.
The claims about the cost of raising children are, in my opinion, simply nonsense. First of all, the USDA did not measure what it costs to raise a child, but rather what parents of differing income levels actually spend. There is an important difference between the two.
Second, the methodology behind the USDA, is goofy, as even its own study notes. For example, the largest part of the “cost” of raising children in that $200,000 estimate is more than $53,000 for housing costs. How did the USDA arrive at that figure? It simply assumes that if a couple has two children and a house valued at $200,000, then each family member incurs $50,000 in housing costs,
Unlike food and health care, no research base exists for allocating estimated household expenditures on housing, transportation, and other miscellaneous goods and services among family members. USDA uses the per capita method in allocating these expenses; the per capita method allocates expenses among household members in equal proportions. A marginal cost method, which assumes that expenditures on children may be measured as the difference in
total expenses between couples with children and equivalent childless couples, was not used
because of limitations with this approach.
Since there’s no agreed upon methodology, the USDA simply went with one that will produce the highest possible housing costs value. Children certainly incur large costs, but the USDA figures are used inappropriately by Longman to exaggerate just how large the economic burden of children is to a typical family.
Longman goes on to argue that people in modern industrialized societies are essentially living in environments which promote childlessness,
Some biologists now speculate that modern humans have created an environment in which the “fittest,” or most successful, individuals are those who have few, if any, children. As more and more people find themselves living under urban conditions in which children no longer provide economic benefit to their parents, but rather are costly impediments to material success, people who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them.
. . .
. . . Once, demographers believed that some law of human nature would prevent fertility rates from remaining below replacement level within any healthy population for more than brief periods. After all, don’t we all carry the genes of our Neolithic ancestors, who one way or another managed to produce enough babies to sustain the race? Today, however, it has become clear that no law of nature ensure that human beings, living in free, developed societies, will create enough children to reproduce themselves.
It’d be nice if Longman didn’t use weasel phrases like “some biologists” (really, which ones?), but clearly the economic advantages of having children have been largely wiped out in the developed countries, leaving the urge to reproduce to compete with the urge to enjoy the material trappings of life.
But I’m still not convinced of all the dire horrors that are supposed to result from this. Yes, issues of how to create innovation and deal with medical costs 50 years down the road look immense, but then back in the 1970s the question of how to deal with the 14 billion people in the world by the end of the 21st century also looked immense and all but unsolvable. Nobody on either side of this argument gives much credit to the driving force that got us into and out of all sorts of problems, the unique human ability to respond and change in dramatic ways to circumstance.
Like the overpopulation doomsayers in the 1970s, Longman proposes any number of government meddling to produce the fertility rates he think would be optimum.
These include:
- exempting parents from having to pay into social security systems (since they already contribute so much simply by having children)
- changing the structure of education so young people are busy procreating rather than studying (“education should be a lifetime pursuit, rather than crammed into one’s prime reproductive years”)
- use legislation to make it more expensive to smoke, be fat, or sedentary (to reduce the alleged social medical costs of such activities later in life)
These are, at best, ineffective half measures that won’t work even if you agree with Longman about the nature of the problem.
Let me propose a measure that might work, if enacted widely enough — ban contraception and abortion. After all, the last time I check the problem is not that college students are not engaging in enough procreative activities, but rather that they have at their disposal any number of means to prevent procreation itself.
Of course the odds of something like that happening are about the same as the odds of adopting Paul Ehrlich’s recent recommendations to screw the developing world by abandoning free trade and liberal immigration policies. So we’ll muddle along as we always have, finding solutions to problems spontaneously, while those on the sidelines fret and worry about the next terrible crisis to face humanity.
Sources:
The Global Baby Bust. Phillip Longman, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004.
Of course the odds of something like that happening are about the same as the odds of adopting Paul Ehrlich’s recent recommendations to screw the developing world by abandoning free trade and liberal immigration policies. So we’ll muddle along as we always have, finding solutions to problems spontaneously,