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.”

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

posted by Eve at 7:54 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

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.

Labels: demographics, Europe, natalism, poverty, Russia

posted by Eve at 4:38 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

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.

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

posted by Eve at 1:03 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT