VATICAN ECONOMIST: RECESSION CAUSED BY LOW BIRTHRATE: Zenit

reports:

Bankers are not the cause of the global economic crisis, according to the president of the Institute for the Works of Religion. Rather, the cause is ordinary people who do not "believe in the future" and have few or no children.

"The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, said in an interview on Vatican Television's "Octava Dies."

He noted the Western world's population growth rate is at 0% -- that is, two children per couple -- and this, he said, has led to a profound change in the structure of society.

"Instead of stimulating families and society to again believe in the future and have children […] we have stopped having children and have created a situation, a negative economic context decrease," Gotti Tedeschi observed. "And decrease means greater austerity."

“With the decline in births,” he explained, “there are fewer young people that productively enter the working world. And there are many more elderly people that leave the system of production and become a cost for the collective.

“In practice the fixed costs of this economic and social structure increase. How dramatically they increase depends on how evidently unbalanced the structure of the population is and how much wealth it has. The fixed costs however increase: The costs of health increase and the social costs increase."

When this happens, the economist stated, "taxes can no longer be reduced.”

more

Labels: Catholic Church, demographics, economics

posted by Eve at 9:01 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

PLUMMETING BIRTHRATES THREATEN PROSPERITY WORLDWIDE. CAN AMERICA BUCK THE TREND?: Steven Malanga

in City Journal:

With more than one in five Japanese 65 or older, the government is encouraging citizens like Tsuneko Hariki of Kamikatsu to work well past traditional retirement age.

In Kamikatsu, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, officials have set up an agricultural cooperative whose members log on to computers daily to check the fluctuating prices of the produce that they grow. Then they go out and pick whatever is fetching the best price that day. Unusual, yes, but what’s truly surprising about this cooperative is the average age of its members: 70. In a country where lots of folks retire at 60, Kamikatsu’s residents are working well into their senior years—and they’re doing so not only to buoy retirement earnings but also to energize the local economy. With nearly half of the town’s residents 65 and older, the government realized that there simply wasn’t enough of a traditional workforce available to build or staff most typical industries.

Kamikatsu shows in microcosm what Japan and several other nations now face--and what others soon will. For decades, demographers and economists have watched the world’s fertility rate plunge as countries grew wealthier and more urban. These days, fertility rates in much of the industrialized world are far below replacement levels--that is, the number of kids that parents must have to replace themselves and adults who remain childless. Though the steepest declines happened first in wealthy countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain, even many developing countries have seen their fertility rates head downward. ...

Seeking solutions, a few policy experts have begun looking more closely at the United States. After a big drop in the mid-1970s, America’s fertility rate bounced back and has remained relatively stable, near replacement level--a 30-year-plus pattern that astounds European observers. For a time, demographers explained the difference between the U.S. and other industrialized countries by observing that America’s population was more diverse, with more recent immigrants who had more children. But fertility levels among native-born white Americans also remain higher than among native-born Europeans, and the U.S.’s overall fertility outpaces that of other countries with a high percentage of foreign-born residents.

Demographers have also speculated that the higher fertility rate is a function of America’s being a more religious country, reasoning that those who engage in organized religious activity favor larger families. One survey found 46 percent of Americans attending religious services regularly, compared with just 4 percent of Japanese, 7 percent of Swedes, and 16 percent of Germans. Yet fertility rates have remained stable in the U.S. even as they have plummeted in religious fundamentalist countries like Iran and Jordan, as well as in developing countries like Mexico, where rates of religious attendance remain higher than in America.

Faced with these contradictions, some scholars are now positing the distinctive nature of the U.S. economy and its labor market as a principal reason why Americans are having so many kids. “In general, women (and couples) are deterred from having children when the economic cost--in the form of lower lifetime wages--is too high,” wrote economists Francesco Billari, José Antonio Ortega, and Hans-Peter Kohler in a 2006 study. “Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then reenter the labor force.”

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Labels: demographics, economics, Europe, Italy, Japan, natalism

posted by Eve at 7:54 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

SOUTH KOREANS TOLD TO GO HOME AND MAKE BABIES: BBC

reports:

South Korean government workers are being given an unusual instruction - go home and multiply.

At 1900 on Wednesday, officials at the Ministry of Health will turn off all the lights in the building.

They want to encourage staff to go home to their families and, well, make bigger ones. They plan to repeat the experiment every month.

more

Labels: demographics, South Korea

posted by Eve at 4:24 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

SOUTH KOREANS TOLD TO GO HOME AND MAKE BABIES: BBC

reports:

South Korean government workers are being given an unusual instruction - go home and multiply.

At 1900 on Wednesday, officials at the Ministry of Health will turn off all the lights in the building.

They want to encourage staff to go home to their families and, well, make bigger ones. They plan to repeat the experiment every month.

more

Labels: demographics, South Korea

posted by Eve at 4:24 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

SKEWED CHINA BIRTH RATE TO LEAVE 24 MILLION MEN SINGLE: Agence France Presse

reports:

More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.

The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country's population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said. ...

Researcher Wang Guangzhou said the skewed birth ratio could lead to difficulties for men with lower incomes in finding spouses, as well as a widening age gap between partners, according to the Global Times.

Another researcher quoted by the newspaper, Wang Yuesheng, said men in poorer parts of China would be forced to accept marriages late in life or remain single for life, which could "cause a break in family lines."

"The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is more than 40 years old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely on," Wang said. ...

The Global Times said abductions and trafficking of women were "rampant" in areas with excess numbers of men, citing the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

more

Labels: abortion, China, demographics, one-child policy

posted by Eve at 5:46 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

SO YOU REALLY WANT TO SAVE THE PLANET, DO YOU?: Colby Cosh

blogs:

Diane Francis’s Tuesday Financial Post column calling for a global one-child policy as the real answer to man-made global warming has become an instant classic in the art of antagonizing readers. The piece could correctly be described as half-crazy, of course. Even granting that we are willing to endow the state with monstrous population-control powers, and Francis is obviously willing, her praise for China’s population-growth measures as “simple” suggests a willful blindness to its demographic effects and to the inegalitarian way the policy has actually been applied.

In China, the one-child policy has been a class war that skewed the natural sex ratio, introduced chaos into the family-formation process, and condemned millions of men to lifetime service in a reserve army of the unmarried. It’s the biggest, cruellest biological experiment in history. The results aren’t really in yet. And even if it “works” by environmental criteria, a project that the Chinese can pull off will not necessarily be scalable upward to the entire species. I feel silly even having to point all this out.

What I like about the column is that it puts population growth front and centre in the emissions debate; it gets in our faces.

more

Labels: children, demographics, family size, population control

posted by Eve at 11:28 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

THE REAL INCONVENIENT TRUTH: Diane Francis

in the Financial Post (Canada):

The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days. ...

The fix is simple. It's dramatic. And yet the world's leaders don't even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms, then cap-and-trade subsidies.

None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world's big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.

more

Labels: children, demographics, family size, population control

posted by Eve at 11:22 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

ASTONISHING FALLS IN THE FERTILITY RATE ARE BRINGING WITH THEM BIG BENEFITS: The Economist

piece:

THOMAS MALTHUS first published his “Essay on the Principle of Population”, in which he forecast that population growth would outstrip the world’s food supply, in 1798. His timing was unfortunate, for something started happening around then which made nonsense of his ideas. As industrialisation swept through what is now the developed world, fertility fell sharply, first in France, then in Britain, then throughout Europe and America. When people got richer, families got smaller; and as families got smaller, people got richer.

Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

At a time when Malthusian worries are resurgent and people fear the consequences for an overcrowded planet, the decline in fertility is surprising and somewhat reassuring. It means that worries about a population explosion are themselves being exploded--and it carries a lesson about how to solve the problems of climate change.

Worth a bundle

Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain--from 1800 to 1930--took just 20 years--from 1965 to 1985--in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006--and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

Falling fertility in poor and middle-income societies is a boon in and of itself. It means that, for the first time, the majority of mothers are having the number of children they want, which seems to be--as best one can judge--two. (China is an exception: its fall in fertility has been coerced.)

It is also a boon in what it represents, which is greater security for billions of vulnerable people.

more

Labels: Africa, Asia, demographics, poverty

posted by Eve at 11:56 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

SLIPPING GROWTH: Nicholas Eberstadt

in the Berlin Journal:

Ever since the days of the British political economist Thomas Robert Malthus [1766-1834], demographic commentators have been faulted for excessive despondency, for being overly ready to find ubiquitous "population problems" in virtually every new demographic development. Be that as it may, serious or even disastrous population problems can still threaten real existing countries--even today. In fact, we are currently witnessing a demographic crisis of historic proportions right before our very eyes.

The crisis, however, is not ravaging an illiterate and impoverished Third World country. Instead, it is unfolding in a modern, highly-educated nation that sent the first cosmonaut into space: the Russian Federation. Russia is in the grip of startling and anomalous demographic tendencies, trends whose humanitarian and economic consequences are not only self-evidently adverse, but, quite arguably, dire.

Russia today is a society at peace. But judging by vital statistics alone, it looks like a country trapped in a prolonged and devastating war. Since the end of the Communist era, in late 1991, the country's birth rates have collapsed while its death rates have soared. Over the post-Communist era as a whole, Russia has reported three deaths for every two births. The year 2008 was a "good" one for modern Russia: it registered "only" five deaths for every four births.

Since the beginning of 1992, Russia has recorded nearly 13 million more deaths than births, and the country's population has dropped by about 7 million; only a net influx of migrants prevented an even steeper drop. The magnitude of Russia's ongoing population decline (to date) is overshadowed in our post-war epoch only by China's terrible population decline in the immediate wake of Mao's disastrous "Great Leap Forward." China's population decline abated, however, as soon as Beijing's fanatical policies were reversed. Russia's depopulation, on the other hand, shows no signs of a genuine turnaround.

One major component of the "demographic shock" that Russia has been experiencing was a sudden, radical reduction in fertility. In the late Soviet era--the Perestroika period--the Russian Federation's childbearing patterns held more or less at the levels required for long-term population replacement. By contrast, in the early years of the 21st Century, Russia's fertility rates have been almost 40 percent below the replacement level. Although the Kremlin unveiled an ambitious and expensive pro-natal population program several years ago, this seems to have elicited only a modest increase in births. According to official Russian reports, birth totals in the first four months of 2009 were up, albeit slightly, on a year-to-year basis--but death rates remained substantially higher than birth rates. ...

What distinguishes modern-day Russia's demography from the rest of Europe's is not its fertility trends, however, but rather its patterns of mortality and survival, which can be described as shocking--or even disastrous. In the post-war era, the modern world has been all but exploding with health. According to the UN's Population Division, for the planet as a whole, life expectancy at birth jumped by about twenty years between the early 1950s and the early 2000s. Russia has been an exception to this global rule: according to those same UN estimates, the country's life expectancy was actually two years lower in 2000-2005 than in the late 1950s. Though there has been some recovery since 2005, life expectancy for both males and females in the Russian Federation is lower now than it was four decades ago.

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Labels: demographics, Europe, natalism, poverty, Russia

posted by Eve at 4:38 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

SINGLE LIVING IS THE WAVE OF THE PRESENT: Washington Post

reports:

Living alone is on its way to becoming the new norm in parts of the Washington area, as the proportion of households headed by married couples has declined and one-person households have jumped.

Population statistics released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday, based on samples taken from 2006 to 2008, reflect national trends that have accelerated since the 2000 census. The Washington area figures were particularly stark.

Every jurisdiction in the region showed a leap in single households. In most places, they now make up 20 to 30 percent of all households. In the District and Alexandria, almost half of all households have just one person. ...

Lisa Neidert, a researcher with the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, said young people going through that stage are less likely to live with roommates than they were two decades ago. And people who divorce are less likely to remarry.

"It's the idea that if you're not in a married relationship, that's okay," she said. "You definitely have young people feeling more independent. On the other hand, strong family ties have faded a bit. In 1940, a 70-year-old was going to live with a 40-year-old son. Now, they're not even living in the same community." ...

The Census Bureau survey also showed an increase in the number of households headed by single parents. In Prince William County, 11 percent of households are headed by single parents, up from 7 percent in 1990. Fairfax and Loudoun counties stayed the same, about 6 percent. The District also stayed roughly the same, about 10 percent.

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Labels: culture, DC, demographics, single parenting

posted by Eve at 3:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

FEWER BRITISH BABIES WOULD MEAN A FAIRER PLANET: Alex Renton

in the Observer:

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government's target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.

And if that makes sense, why not start cutting population everywhere? Are condoms not the greenest technology of all?

World population is forecast to peak at 9.2bn by 2050. According to a report by the LSE for the Optimum Population Trust, the lobbying body currently asking parents to "Stop at Two", it would cost $220m to provide the family planning that would reduce the 2050 population by half a billion, preventing the emission of 34 gigatonnes of carbon. Introducing low-carbon technology for the same result would cost more than $1 trillion. ...

So the richer a country gets, the more pressing the need for it to curb its population. The only nation to have taken steps to do this is China – and the way it went about enforcing the notorious one child policy is one of the reasons the rest of us are so horrified by the notion of state intervention. Yet China now has 300-400 million fewer people. It was certainly the most successful governmental attempt to preserve the world's resources so far.

But lowering birth rate need not be so draconian. Experience shows it is most effectively done by ensuring women's equality and improving their education, while providing cheap contraception. Birth rate, gender equality, education and poverty are inextricably linked.

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Labels: contraception, culture, demographics, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 9:15 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

PLAN WOULD PAY JAPANESE FAMILIES TO HAVE KIDS: CNN

reports:

Yoshiko Sato would love to give her only son a brother or a sister. But money struggles and Japan's cost of living have pushed the mother to wait.

A proposal to pay parents about $3,400 a year per child has got her thinking seriously about expanding her family. The cash for kids plan is the brainchild of the country's new ruling Democratic Party of Japan, which came into power during the elections this week. The proposal has garnered supporters and critics.

"It would help us with a second child," Sato said.

The proposal would pay families the money every year until the child reached high school. It is an effort to boost Japan's birthrate, which is one of the lowest in the world and is a major drag on the country's economy. It is compounded by Japan's rapidly aging population. ...

Critics also have said the plan would not fix a significant problem for working families -- the lack of day care centers. About 40,000 children are on waiting lists for day care, according to government figures.

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Labels: demographics, Japan

posted by Eve at 1:54 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

THE CURRENT NYT MAGAZINE

is a special issue, "Saving the World's Women." The best places to start are probably here, which I think is the introduction--alternately heartbreaking and inspiring--and here, which is an essay pointing out some complications. From the latter piece:

...Yet these strategies — though invaluable — underestimate the complexity of the situation in certain countries. To be sure, China and India are poor. But in both nations, girls are actually more likely to be missing in richer areas than in poorer ones, and in cities than in rural areas. Having more money, a better education and (in India) belonging to a higher caste all raise the probability that a family will discriminate against its daughters. The bias against girls applies in some of the wealthiest and best-educated nations in the world, including, in recent years, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. It also holds among Indian immigrants in Britain and among Chinese, Indian and South Korean immigrants in the United States. In the last few years, the percentage of missing girls has been among the highest in the middle-income, high-education nations of the Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Nor does a rise in a woman’s autonomy or power in the family necessarily counteract prejudice against girls. Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute have found that while increasing women’s decision-making power would reduce discrimination against girls in some parts of South Asia, it would make things worse in the north and west of India. “When women’s power is increased,” wrote Lisa C. Smith and Elizabeth M. Byron, “they use it to favor boys.” ...

What Das Gupta discovered is that wealthier and more educated women face this same imperative to have boys as uneducated poor women — but they have smaller families, thus increasing the felt urgency of each birth. In a family that expects to have seven children, the birth of a girl is a disappointment; in a family that anticipates only two or three children, it is a tragedy.

Thus development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination.

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Labels: abortion, Africa, Asia, demographics, poverty, women

posted by Eve at 4:26 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Marriage Is the "Real Vocation Crisis": NY Archbishop

in Catholic News Agency interview:

Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York told CNA last week that the Catholic Church is currently facing many challenges, four being: the vocation to marriage, the state of Catholic parishes and schools, the great number of lapsed Catholics and finally the difficulties in a culture desperate to keep the Church and morals out of the public square. ...

The archbishop then broke down Jesus’ words into four practical challenges the Church currently faces in preaching the Gospel to all people, the first being the instability of marriage and family.

“That’s where we have the real vocation crisis,” he remarked, noting that “only 50% of our Catholic young people are getting married.”

“We have a vocation crisis to life-long, life-giving, loving, faithful marriage. If we take care of that one, we’ll have all the priests and nuns we need for the church,” Dolan said.

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Labels: Catholic Church, demographics, Marriage, New York, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 3:51 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

AMERICAN BABIES ARE RUINING EVERYTHING: William McGurn

in the Wall Street Journal:

Forget about the birthers, and the nutty claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

More and more, we are hearing from people who might best be described as anti-birthers. Their claims have nothing to do with long- versus short-form Hawaiian birth certificates. Instead, they advance a simple proposition: that the birth of each additional American child is a kind of calamity for the environment.

The most recent example of anti-birth thinking comes from Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax of Oregon State University. In a study called “Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals,” they suggest that if you truly care about the environment, it’s not enough to trade your SUV for a Prius, use the right lightbulbs, or limit your lawn to organic fertilizers. To the contrary, you need to start thinking about something way more important: i.e., having one less child.

The “basic premise,” the study reports, is that “a person is responsible for emissions of his descendents.”

When Mr. Murtaugh runs the numbers, he finds some alarming results. Take an American woman who checks all the green boxes: She recycles, installs energy efficient windows, cuts back how much she drives, and so on. Yet simply by having two children, Prof. Murtaugh reports, she will add nearly 40 times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions she had saved with those lifestyle changes. No wonder the Los Angeles Times Web site reports on this study under the title “Tie Your Tubes and Save the Planet?” ...

In some ways, this focus on American and British births is an improvement over the previous bout of overpopulation worries. Back in the 1970s, when the experts complained about people having too many children, they meant Chinese, Filipinos, Latin Americans, Africans, et al. ...

The real answer, of course, is to have a little more faith in the creative powers of human beings. Given the freedom to grow and innovate, surely the same people who have licked polio, sent a man to the moon, and given us a revolution in information will sooner or later come up with new technologies that will provide for our energy needs while being friendlier to the environment.

more (Murtaugh study as PDF is here)

Labels: demographics, family size

posted by Eve at 10:51 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

TIE YOUR TUBES AND SAVE THE PLANET?: The LA Times

Greenspace blog:

Environmentalists tend to avoid the topic of population control. Too touchy. But the politically incorrect issue is becoming unavoidable as the global population lurches toward a predicted 9 billion people by mid-century. Will there be enough food? Enough water? Will planet-heating carbon dioxide gas become ever more uncontrollable?

Now comes a study (PDF) by statisticians at Oregon State University focusing on the elephant in the room. If you are serious about your carbon footprint, think: birth control.

The greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more significant than the amount any American would save by such practices as driving a fuel-efficient car, recycling or using energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances, according to Paul Murtaugh, an OSU professor of statistics. Under current U.S. consumption patterns, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of an average parent--about 5.7 times a person's lifetime emissions, he calculates.

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Labels: demographics, family size

posted by Eve at 12:14 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

FAD OR CRISIS? JAPAN'S "MARRIAGE-HUNTING" CRAZE: Channel News Asia

reports:

TOKYO: Dressed to the nines on a balmy summer night, a crowd of young Japanese filled the reception area of a Tokyo wedding hall, a white mansion with Greek columns romantically festooned with fairy lights.

The setting may have seemed a little gaudy, but the 100-odd men and women there, clutching their cocktails and scanning the room, were seriously focused on their goal -- finding the love of their life.

The twenty to forty-somethings are part of a new fad sweeping Japan: "konkatsu" or "marriage-hunting", a word play on "job hunting", that suggests finding Mr or Mrs Right is a matter of good research and thorough planning.

An expert in the field had some advice for the assembled lonely hearts.

"Try not to make that instant decision," said Helen Fisher, a US anthropologist and special guest at the Match.com party in Tokyo's upmarket Nakameguro district. "Go up and talk to them and find out about them.

"The whole point of this evening is to try to fall in love."

This year Japan has gone konkatsu-crazy, with the trend spawning countless magazine articles, a weekly TV drama and a best-selling book.

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Labels: Asia, culture, demographics, Japan, Marriage

posted by Eve at 12:09 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The Cost of Low Fertility in Europe: New study

summary:

As in many parts of the world, Europe has seen a rapid decline in fertility. In 1960, Estonia was the only European nation whose total fertility rate was less than two. Today, only two European countries -- Albania and Iceland – have fertility rates above two. Several factors are thought to be driving that decline in Western Europe: socioeconomic incentives to delay childbearing; a decline in the desired number of children; and institutional factors, such as labor market rigidities, lack of child care, and changing gender roles. Also, the nations in Eastern Europe have gone through major economic, political, and social change.

In the long run, low rates of fertility are associated with diminished economic growth, according to a new study by NBER Research Associate David Bloom and his co-authors David Canning, Günther Fink, and Jocelyn Finlay. In The Cost of Low Fertility in Europe (NBER Working Paper No. 14820), they observe that in the short term, low fertility rates raise per capita income by lowering families’ costs of child-rearing and boosting the share of working-age people. But as that working-age population moves into retirement, the number of workers who replace them will shrink. So, whatever short-term boon European nations may have gained from low youth dependency will be overwhelmed eventually by the economic burdens of old-age dependency. ...

“In short, migration is highly unlikely to have a major effect on falling working-age shares in Western European countries over the next decades,” the authors write. “The size of the economic repercussions of declining working-age shares on economic development, however, will critically depend on individual behavior.”

Previous research has shown that for every extra child that a woman has, her labor participation falls on average 1.9 years over her lifetime. So as fertility falls, women tend to spend more time working, which allows them to accumulate more savings, more experience, and possibly a better-paying job. This accumulation of physical and human capital may offset some of the overall long-term income decline that low fertility suggests.

more

Labels: demographics, Europe

posted by Imapp Staff at 7:47 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Caritas in Veritate: Pope Benedict XVI

excerpted:

44. The notion of rights and duties in development must also take account of the problems associated with population growth. This is a very important aspect of authentic development, since it concerns the inalienable values of life and the family. To consider population increase as the primary cause of underdevelopment is mistaken, even from an economic point of view. Suffice it to consider, on the one hand, the significant reduction in infant mortality and the rise in average life expectancy found in economically developed countries, and on the other hand, the signs of crisis observable in societies that are registering an alarming decline in their birth rate. Due attention must obviously be given to responsible procreation, which among other things has a positive contribution to make to integral human development. The Church, in her concern for man's authentic development, urges him to have full respect for human values in the exercise of his sexuality. It cannot be reduced merely to pleasure or entertainment, nor can sex education be reduced to technical instruction aimed solely at protecting the interested parties from possible
disease or the “risk” of procreation. This would be to impoverish and disregard the deeper meaning of sexuality, a meaning which needs to be acknowledged and responsibly appropriated not only by individuals but also by the community. It is irresponsible to view sexuality merely as a source of pleasure, and likewise to regulate it through strategies of mandatory birth control. In either case materialistic ideas and policies are at work, and individuals are ultimately subjected to various forms of violence. Against such policies, there is a need to defend the primary competence of the family in the area of sexuality,111 as opposed to the State and its restrictive policies, and to ensure that parents are suitably prepared to undertake their responsibilities.

Morally responsible openness to life represents a rich social and economic resource. Populous nations have been able to emerge from poverty thanks not least to the size of their population and the talents of their people. On the other hand, formerly prosperous nations are presently passing through a phase of uncertainty and in some cases decline, precisely because of their falling birth rates; this has become a crucial problem for highly affluent societies. The decline in births, falling at times beneath the so-called “replacement level”, also puts a strain on social welfare systems, increases their cost, eats into savings and hence the financial resources needed for investment, reduces the availability of qualified labourers, and narrows the “brain pool” upon which nations can draw for their needs. Furthermore, smaller and at times miniscule families run the risk of impoverishing social relations, and failing to ensure effective forms of solidarity. These situations are symptomatic of scant
confidence in the future and moral weariness. It is thus becoming a social and even economic necessity once more to hold up to future generations the beauty of marriage and the family, and the fact that these institutions correspond to the deepest needs and dignity of the person. In view of this, States are called to enact policies promoting the centrality and the integrity of the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, the primary vital cell of society, and to assume responsibility for its economic and fiscal needs, while respecting its essentially relational character.

more

Labels: Catholic Church, demographics, family policy, Marriage, religion, sex

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:09 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

BILLIONAIRE CLUB IN BID TO CURB OVERPOPULATION: The Times

reports:

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey. ...

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests.

The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.

This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values.

Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation.

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Labels: demographics, poverty

posted by Eve at 2:51 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

BRING ON THE BABY BOOM: Laura Vanderkam

in USA Today:

...But it's not just TV. Judging by People magazine stories on celebrity bumps, babies dominate pop culture these days. Interestingly, babies are dominating the real world, too. In 2007, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the total fertility rate in the USA hit 2.12 lifetime births per woman, a bit higher than 2006, and much higher than the 1.74 births per woman in 1976.

Of course, the recession could change the trend, but annual changes are less important than this long-term reality: The U.S. is one of the few developed countries to have a fertility rate above replacement level — that is, the roughly 2.1 births per woman necessary to sustain a population. Demographers debate the reasons for this, but given our recent fiscal policies, there's a case to be made that not only is a high birthrate a good sign, we should be hoping it rises at least a bit more.

Certainly, surveying childbearing across the developed world, America is a fecund outlier. When I hauled my 1-year-old to Germany and Austria recently (fertility rates of 1.4), restaurants seemed puzzled by my requests for milk. Supposedly child-friendly Sweden posts a rate of just 1.67; Catholic Italy and Spain just 1.3; only France (1.98) comes close among the big economies.

Demographers have many theories, good and bad, for our exceptionality. The USA does have a lamentably high teen pregnancy rate. We also have many unplanned pregnancies among grown-ups who should know better.

But accidents don't explain everything. Across the developed world, many young women say they want two kids. In the U.S., unlike in Europe, the average woman is quite likely to hit that — and sometimes go over. In a 2008 paper, Steven Martin of the University of Maryland noted an increase in extremely affluent women having three or more kids. Judging from TLC's programming, we could be more accepting of larger families who can support their children (if not cases like "octomom" Nadya Suleman's). If millions of young moms watch these shows, the showcased families might even move the idea of "normal" up.

But compared with Japan's 1.2 rate, even getting the bulk of families to the desired two kids is noteworthy. What's most fascinating is that the USA has managed to do this even as the majority of women work outside the home. Our fertility rate rose 22% from 1976 to 2007, as women's workforce participation rates rose an equal amount (from 47.3% in 1976 to about 59% now — roughly a 25% increase).

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Labels: culture, demographics, economics, family size

posted by Eve at 4:41 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

OUT-OF-WEDLOCK BIRTHS ON THE RISE WORLDWIDE: USA Today

reports:

The percentage of births to unmarried mothers is increasing worldwide, according to a new federal report that shows a universal upward trend over the last 25 years.

Among 14 countries analyzed in the report by the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of all live unmarried births in the USA -- 40% in 2007 -- ranks somewhere in the middle. That's up from 18% in 1980. The sharpest rise was from 2002 to 2007, the report found.

Countries with a higher proportion of births to unmarried mothers include Iceland, Sweden, Norway, France, Denmark and the United Kingdom; countries with a lower percentage than the USA include Ireland, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy and Japan.

In 2007, the Netherlands had the same percentage as the USA, but it has increased ten-fold there from 4% in 1980.

Demographer Patrick Heuveline of the University of California-Los Angeles compared non-marital fertility in many of the same countries about a decade ago. He found that U.S. mothers are more likely to be single parents because the non-married couple relationship doesn't tend to last very long, something he says continues to be true, he says.

"There might be little bit more cohabitation now, but it's probably true that the United States remains unique and ahead of other countries for births to single mothers not in a cohabiting partnership," he says.

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Labels: cohabitation, demographics, Europe, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 9:21 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Mortgaging the Future of Families: Roland Warren

in the Washington Times:

...The second story was the report that in 2007 the United States experienced a baby boom of post-World War II proportions. More babies — 4,317,119 to be exact — were born than in any other year of our nation's history. That's good news because, unlike many of our European friends, the U.S. population is replacing itself at a healthy pace.

However, the not-so-good news is that we had a record number of births to unwed mothers. Forty percent of all births were out-of-wedlock, and more than three-quarters of these moms are 20 or older. ...

As with the subprime mortgage craze, there will be many unintended consequences of our nation's growing acceptance and, too often, celebration, of creating single-mother families. We are moving toward an era of the "subprime" family, with fathers as optional as an adequate down payment.

But with families, like mortgages, structure matters. Indeed, in each of the mortgage-backed investments that are now deemed toxic, the underlying assets had value but the structure made them more risky.

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Labels: demographics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Imapp Staff at 10:35 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

IS FEMINISM THE NEW NATALISM?: Ross Douthat

replies to Michelle Goldberg:
...I'll be curious to hear what Goldberg has to say about the United States, because one could argue that the threat of population decline is also a reasonable argument for a more flexible, freewheeling labor market, and other dreamy American-style policies. That was one of the takeaways from Russell Shorto's big Times Magazine piece last year on fertility in the developed world, for instance. Like Goldberg, Shorto argued that the combination of a modern economy and a patriarchal social model leaves you with the worst of both worlds where fertility is concerned: Women are expected to be workers and full-time caregivers (to both children and to aging parents, in many cases), men aren't expected to pick up the slack, and so women end up too overwhelmed to contemplate having a second or a third kid, or even a first. But he also noted that while the Scandinavian combination of liberal social attitudes and generous day care and family-leave provisions produce higher birth rates than Spain and Italy, if you're really looking for replacement-level fertility, you need to turn to the United States:

"Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?" says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument -- that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population -- doesn't apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It's also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it's also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. "There's much less flexibility in the European system," Haub says. "In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid." There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: "In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost -- in the form of lower lifetime wages -- is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force." An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.

Incidentally, this is a point that the Willetts report (PDF) makes as well, though Goldberg doesn't mention it: The intersection of traditional gender roles and a modern economy may be driving down the birth rate in Italy, but that explanation doesn't hold up for Germany, where social attitudes are more liberal, and so Willetts spends a lot of time talking about ... the impact of Germany's labor market regulations on family formation.

In other words, saying that "feminism is the new natalism" doesn't necessarily mean that statism is the new natalism. If you're a "choice feminist," interested in maximizing female (and male, for that matter) freedom to choose to work or to choose not to, you may find more to like about the American way of parenting. (And you might be looking for reforms - like, ahem, a more pro-family tax structure - that would increase the flexibility that our model currently affords to parents.) If you're more of a Linda Hirshman-style feminist, on the other hand, you'll probably prefer the Scandinavian model, where after the guaranteed family leave runs its course, the socialized day care effectively incentivizes parents to get (back) to work whether they want to or not.

On the question of whether the latter model is really as empowering as its advocates assume, it's worth quoting Sandra Tsing Loh:

The debate about mothers and work: it always ends--doesn't it?--with Sweden. Oh, if America could only be like Sweden--such a humane society, with its free day care for working mothers and its government subsidies of up to $11,900 per child per year. The problem? One hates to be Mrs. Red-State Republican Bringdown, but yes ... the taxes. Currently, the top marginal income-tax rate in Sweden is nearly 60 percent (down from its peak in 1979 of 87 percent). Government spending amounts to more than half of Sweden's GDP ... On the upside, government spending creates jobs: from 1970 to 1990, a whopping 75 percent of Swedish jobs created were in the public sector ... providing social welfare services ... almost all of which were filled by women. Uh-oh. In short, as Gilbert points out, because of the 40 percent tax rate on her husband's job, a new mother may be forced to take that second, highly taxed job to supplement the family's finances; in other words, she leaves her toddlers behind from eight to five (in that convenient universal day care) so she can go take care of other people's toddlers or empty the bedpans of elderly strangers. (As Alan Wolfe has pointed out, "the Scandinavian welfare states which express so well a sense of obligation to distant strangers, are beginning to make it more difficult to express a sense of obligation to those with whom one shares family ties.")

That's from Tsing Loh's review of Neil Gilbert's fascinating A Mother's Work: How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life. If you're interested in this topic, you should read the whole thing, and the whole thing.
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Labels: demographics, Europe, tax policy, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 3:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Europe's Birth Strike: Michelle Goldberg

at TAPPED:

...Given this sort of rhetoric, it’s tempting to dismiss concerns about demographic decline as an anti-feminist race panic. The thing is, though, rapidly declining birth rates really are a problem, especially for the sort of generous welfare states that liberals love. I have a whole chapter about this in my new book about the global battle over reproductive rights, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World. The problem isn’t so much absolute population size as it is age structure – too few young people supporting too many old people.

While immigration is obviously part of the solution, immigration on the necessary scale is almost certain to produce serious nationalist backlashes. According to an article published a few years ago in the Journal of Population Research, if Italy’s 1995 fertility rate remained constant, then without immigration the country’s population size a century hence would be a mere 14 percent of what it is today. Even if Italy could smoothly adjust to a majority-immigrant society, will those immigrants really support a system in which a good part of their taxes go to maintaining a bunch of old Italians who they don’t necessarily feel any connection to?

I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there’s so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn’t, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones! Basically, the societies where birthrates have plunged to dangerous levels – Russia, Catholic countries like Poland, Spain and Italy, as well as Japan and Singapore – are all places that make it very difficult for women to combine work and family. In countries that support working mothers, like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France, birthrates are basically fine – they’re either just at replacement, or shrinking in a very slow, totally manageable way. (The United States is the exception, for a whole host of reasons – some intuitive and some surprising – that I’ll elaborate some other time.) That’s why the Tory MP David Willetts, in a very smart 2003 report (PDF) on the threat low birthrates pose to Europe’s pension systems, wrote that “feminism is the new natalism.”

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Labels: demographics, Europe, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 3:37 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Demographic Winter Heralds Same-Sex Marriage Spring: Jennifer Roback Morse

at MercatorNet:

...The gay rights movement has targeted New England for their “6 by 12” strategy of having same sex marriage in all six of the New England states by 2012. This strategy makes sense from their point of view. They already have same sex marriage in Massachusetts and Connecticut, by judicial fiat. In addition, New England is less religious than the rest of the country. And this is a region which has already given up on having babies as a viable way to create a future.

A priest from Vermont recently told me what it is like to minister in one of the least religious states in America. It has one of the highest proportions of the population who consider themselves “unaffiliated” with any religious tradition, at 26 per cent, compared with 16 per cent of the US population. Only 23 per cent of the Vermont population attends church services at least once a week, compared with 39 per cent of the general US population. The priest has had one wedding in the past year, and that was a couple in their fifties. He has perhaps one or two baptisms per year. It sounded rather grim, and a lot like Europe. ...

Vermont has the lowest total fertility rate of any state in the union: 1.66 babies per woman. (Note: you have to click on the link for the excel file to see the birth rates.) While you’re looking at the table, please notice that the six New England states, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, are in the “top ten” of the lowest total fertility rate states in the country. Not surprisingly, Vermont has a low population growth rate compared with the rest of the country: Vermont’s population grew 2 per cent between 2000 and 2007, while the entire country grew by 7.2 per cent over the same period.

None of these states are replacing themselves with births. All of them have net out-migration: more people left between 2006 and 2007 than moved into the New England states. See pages 5 and 6 here.

Taking this demographic malaise together with the general low religious practice, the whole region is a sitting duck for the further de-construction of marriage. And make no mistake: instituting same sex marriage amounts to the de-construction of marriage.

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Labels: demographics, gay marriage, Vermont

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:01 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

GERMAN CHANCELLOR ON DEMOGRAPHICS AND FINANCIAL CRISIS: NY Times

reports:

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, an avowed friend of the United States and the leader of the European Union’s biggest economy, is diplomatic about the coming visit by President Obama. But she is clear that she is not about to give ground on new stimulus spending, stressing the need to maintain fiscal discipline even as she professes to want to work closely with the new American president. ...

Where long lines of unemployed people are the indelible image from the Great Depression in the United States, it is the wheelbarrows of worthless currency during the hyperinflation of the 1920s that preoccupies Germans. Mrs. Merkel has exerted discreet but stubborn leadership in Europe to prevent the kind of overspending that could lead to inflationary pressure on the euro.

It is not, she pointed out, simply a philosophical difference. Borrow and spend today, repay down the road, is a particularly difficult proposition for a country with a shrinking population, she said.

“Over the next decade we will undergo a massive demographic change, and, therefore, borrowing is a greater burden for the future than in a country with a much more continuously growing population, as in the United States of America,” Mrs. Merkel said.

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Labels: demographics, Europe

posted by Eve at 1:47 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

CHURCH LEADER SPARKS GEORGIAN BABY BOOM: BBC

reports:

Two years after having one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Georgia is enjoying something of a baby boom, following an intervention from the country's most senior cleric.

At the end of 2007, in a move to reverse the Caucasian country's dwindling birth figures, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, came up with an incentive. He promised to personally baptise any baby born to parents of more than two children.

There was only one catch: the baby had to be born after the initiative was launched.

The results are, in the words of the Georgian Orthodox Church, "a miracle".

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Labels: demographics, religion

posted by Eve at 3:27 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Headed Toward Extinction?: Philip Longman

at USA Today's blog:

...The U.N. projects that world population could begin declining as early 2040. Those worried about global warming and other environmental threats might view this prospect as an unmitigated good. But lost in most discussions of the subject is the rapid population aging that accompanies declining birthrates.

Under what the U.N. considers the most likely scenario, more than half of all remaining growth comes from a 1.2 billion increase in the number of old people, while the worldwide supply of children will begin falling within 15 years. With fewer workers to support each elder, the world economy might have to run just that much faster, and consume that much more resources, or else living standards will fall.

In the USA, where nearly one-fifth of Baby Boomers never had children, the hardship of vanishing retirement savings will be compounded by the strains on both formal and informal care-giving networks caused by the spread of childlessness. A pet will keep you company in old age, but it is unlikely to be of use in helping you navigate the health care system or in keeping predatory reverse mortgage brokers at bay.

Even countries in which women have few career choices are not immune from the spreading birth dearth and resulting age wave. Under the grip of militant Islamic clerisy, Iran has seen its population of children implode. Accordingly, Iran's population is now aging at a rate nearly three times that of Western Europe. Maybe the middle aging of the Middle East will bring a mellower tone to the region, but middle age will pass swiftly to old age. China, with its one-family-one-child policy, is on a similar course, becoming a 4-2-1 society in which each child supports two parents and four grandparents.

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Labels: demographics

posted by Imapp Staff at 6:47 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

US BIRTHS BREAK RECORD; 40% OUT OF WEDLOCK: Associated Press

reports:

More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than any year in the nation's history, topping the peak during the baby boom 50 years earlier, federal researchers reported Wednesday.

There is both good and bad news from the more than 4.3 million births:

_The U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend.

_However, the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.

The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend begun years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older. ...

But it's not clear the boomlet will last long. Some experts think birth rates are already declining because of the economic recession that began in late 2007.

"I expect they'll go back down. The lowest birth rates recorded in the United States occurred during the Great Depression—and that was before modern contraception," said Dr. Carol Hogue, an Emory University professor of maternal and child health.

The 2007 statistical snapshot reflected a relatively good economy coupled with cultural trends that promoted childbirth, she and others noted.

Meanwhile, U.S. abortions have been dropping to their lowest levels in decades, according to other reports. Some have attributed the abortion decline to better use of contraceptives, but other experts have wondered if the rise in births might indicate a failure in proper use of contraceptives. Some earlier studies have shown declining availability of abortions. ...

CDC officials noted that despite the record number of births, this is nothing like what occurred in the 1950s, when a much smaller population of women were having nearly four children each, on average. That baby boom quickly transformed society, affecting everything from school construction to consumer culture.

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Labels: abortion, demographics, out-of-wedlock births

posted by Eve at 2:58 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

MIXED MARRIAGES DECLINE AS IMMIGRANTS' CHILDREN SEEK SIMILAR PARTNERS: Washington Post

reports:

Katie Xiao emigrated from China when she was 4 and always thought of herself as Americanized -- until she started dating.

Subtle cultural clashes with Caucasian or Latino boyfriends led to unhappy breakups. It made her realize she's more Chinese than she thought. Now she wants to meet a man of Asian descent. ...

Sociologists and demographers are just beginning to study how the children of immigrants who have flowed into the country in recent years will date and marry. The generation that is coming of age is the most open-minded in history and living in the Obama era -- where hues mingle in classrooms, nightclubs and the White House. Conventional wisdom has it that they will begin choosing spouses of other ethnicities as the number of interracial marriages rises.

But scholars delving into the U.S. Census have found a surprising converse trend. Although interracial marriages overall have increased, the rate of Hispanics and Asians marrying partners of other races declined in the past two decades. This suggests that the growing number of immigrants is having a profound effect on coupling, they say.

The number of native- and foreign-born people marrying outside their race fell from 27 to 20 percent for Hispanics and 42 to 33 percent for Asians from 1990 to 2000, according to Ohio State University sociologist Zhenchao Qian, who co-authored a study on the subject. The downward trend continued through last year, Qian said.

"The immigrant population fundamentally changes the pool of potential partners for Asians and Hispanics. It expands the number and reinforces the culture, which means the second generation . . . is more likely to marry people of their own ethnicity," said Daniel T. Lichter, a sociologist at Cornell University.

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Labels: culture, demographics, intermarriage, Marriage

posted by Eve at 5:21 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE CONTINUES SLIDE, STATISTICS CANADA SAYS: CanWest News Service

EDITED 3/6/09: I am so sorry--this story is actually from 2007! I should have noticed that before posting. --Eve

reports:

Love and marriage are fading like the horse and carriage.

OK, not quite, but married couples, and couples with children, have continued a slide that began in the '60s, the latest Canadian Family Portrait report by Statistics Canada reveals.

In fact, for the first time ever, more adults have never been married than have. And the slowest-growing households were those with couples with children under age 25, which edged up just 0.4 per cent.

But while fewer Canadians are getting married, the institution remains the single most common foundation on which Canadians build a family, noted Anne Milan, senior analyst with Statistics Canada's demography division.

The fact that married-couple families with children is still the largest group certainly indicates that marriage is an important component of family life, Milan said in an interview. We're seeing more diversity with the increase in common-law families but marriage overall remains an important family structure.

According to 2006 census data released Wednesday, there is a married couple living in nearly 70 per cent of all families. Even so, over time, the traditional family structure is giving way to alternatives.

For example, there are more adult children are now living at home with their parents, and more youngsters living with their grandparents.

Moreover, common-law and same-sex couples are on the rise.

Indeed, the 2006 Canadian family portrait shows that the number of same-sex couples surged by 32.6 per cent since 2001, five times the pace of opposite-sex couples.

Of Canada's 45,345 same-sex couples, 16.5 per cent were married, according to the first-ever census count of same-sex marriages, reflecting their legalization for all of Canada in mid-2005. ...

For the first time in census history, there were slightly more couples without children at home than with them, reflecting both the aging of the population and lower fertility rates among younger couples.

Also, for the first time in census history, more Canadian adults have never been married than are married, reflecting an ongoing long-term lifestyle change.

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Labels: Canada, demographics, gay marriage, Marriage

posted by Eve at 4:50 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

IS IT SELFISH TO HAVE MORE THAN TWO CHILDREN?: BBC

asks:

Is having more than two children selfish? The future of the planet rarely plays a part when planning a family, but that's got to change, say environmental campaigners.

Parents who have more than two children are "irresponsible" for placing an intolerable burden on resources and increasing damage to eco-systems, says a leading green campaigner.

Curbing population growth through contraception must play a role in fighting global warming, argues Jonathon Porritt.

This week, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which Mr Porrit is a patron, launched its "Stop at Two" online pledge to encourage couples to limit their family's size. ...

Each extra person in the UK emits around 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum, he argues, but he warns population is a subject even some environmentalists think too controversial to discuss.

The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the UK reached 1.90 children per woman in 2007. UK fertility has not been this high since 1980, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The UK population alone is expected to increase from 61 million to 77 million by 2051 but the OPT believes the UK's long-term sustainable population level may be lower than 30 million.

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Labels: demographics, fertility

posted by Eve at 12:42 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

BABY BUST: HOW THE RIGHT'S BABY LOVE IS UNDERMINING CONSERVATISM: Phoebe Maltz

at Doublethink:

In recent years, American conservatism has morphed from a smoke-filled room of martini-swilling adults into nothing short of a nursery. The Right, once known for its emphasis on individual accomplishment and personal responsibility, once a haven for those keen on adults making their own decisions, has linked arms with the stroller moms of Park Slope and put babies at the center of its universe.

The most sensational recent case of this may have been Sarah Palin’s “Seventh Heaven”-esque family, which pitted those inspired by such fruitfulness against those repulsed by it. But even before the Palin brood hit the national scene, conservative intellectuals far from Wasilla had been celebrating babies at all costs. City Journal contributing editor Kay Hymowitz argues that the fight against teen pregnancy is based on a middle-class bias that misapprehends “adolescent baby lust.” Traditionally, conservatives discussing teen birthrates do not accept any lust as worth reckoning with, so this makes for a change. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s recent book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008), proposes family-friendly policies, a two-step approach intended first to gain the support of parents with many children (a traditionalist-leaning bloc), and, in turn, to see those same policies encourage all Americans to have larger families, and thus to shift, for the sake of the children, towards social conservatism.

What ties these authors together is the belief that social ills come not from unwanted pregnancy, but from the fact that we think a pregnancy could possibly be undesirable. In other words, for Hymowitz, the problem is not that very young women want children, but that our society frowns on early marriage. For Douthat and Salam, the concern is not that those who can’t afford to have babies have them anyway, but that the state fails to make childrearing affordable. These writers, along with columnist David Brooks, do not merely want to correct what they see as a stigma surrounding procreation. The purpose of the movement is to encourage Americans—even arugula-eating sophisticates—to have more babies.

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Labels: babies, demographics, fertility, natalism, tax policy

posted by Eve at 1:03 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

RELIGIOUSLY MIXED MARRIAGES AND PARTNERSHIPS IN THE US: Pew study

finds:

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that more than one-in-four (27%) American adults who are married or living with a partner are in religiously mixed relationships. If people from different Protestant denominational families are included - for example, a marriage between a Methodist and a Lutheran - nearly four-in-ten (37%) couples are religiously mixed.

The survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, finds that people who are unaffiliated with a particular religion are the most likely (65%) to have a spouse or partner with a different religious background. Buddhists (55%) also are likely to be married or living with a partner with a religious background different from their own.

In contrast, the individuals least likely to marry or live with a partner outside their faith include Hindus (only 10% are married to or live with someone of a different religion), Mormons (17%) and Catholics (22%).

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Labels: demographics, religion

posted by Eve at 11:48 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Demographic Collapse of Europe

The Times of London reports on this massive EU study of the family. Highlights:

It said that almost one million fewer babies were born in the 27 EU countries last year than in 1980. There were six million more over65s than under14s in Europe last year, against 36 million more children than pensioners in 1980.

The institute said: “Europe is now an elderly continent.” Almost one in every five pregnancies ends in abortion. The marriage rate fell by 24 per cent between 1980 and 2006. Two out of three households have no children, and nearly 28 per cent of households contain only one person.

The EU suggested solution? I'm not making this up:

The report urges national governments to set up a ministry for the family.

You might think they would ask themselves whether setting up yet another government ministry could be part of the problem, rather than the solution.

Cross-posted at my blog.

Labels: demographics

posted by Jennifer Roback Morse at 7:44 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT