Looks like other people are starting to notice that low birth rates may be a good thing:
Matt recently had an interesting post reminding everyone that a lower population has the strong benefit of decreasing the number of people who need to share resources. Predictably, Ross Douthat, knowing that low birthrates are often an indicator of dangerous levels of female equality, threw a minor fit over it. Congrats to Matt for not caving to the disingenuous panic about pension programs, and pointing out a relevant point indicating that there is some level of hypocrisy/bullshitting going on
This seems a bit strange to me, however, since the people urging us to panic about low birthrates are almost always conservatives who oppose the existence of such programs. Certainly, the two commenters I was citing seemed to feel this way.
But he also brings up two things that are simply ignored by people making the argument that we need forced child-bearing to make sure that our dependent elderly are cared for:
What’s more, it’s not entirely clear to me how true this really is. After all, children are a significant—and legitimate—claim on the public purse. And high birthrates seem likely to lead to low workforce participation on the part of women, which makes sustaining your retirement benefits more difficult. Conceivably you could get around that by making public spending on child care and preschool and after school programs even more generous, but that just gets you back around to where we started.
Considering that the people making these arguments would see most women turned into housewives, they’re actually suggesting that we dump what’s probably upwards of 40% of current workers from the workforce, because we’re that desperate for labor. Another thing that seems like it would be great for the economy is cutting that amount of income to so many households, who are already not spending because they don’t have enough money. And the key to making sure that there’s enough money for a dependent elderly population is to dramatically increase the number of dependents overall. Perhaps, if women put our minds to it, we can turn 75-80% of the country into dependents.
I’m only mildly kidding. Obviously, the demographic panickers don’t expect poor women and women of color to quit their jobs and become housewives, and they probably don’t intend for them to be the ones having a dozen children. Ideally, they’d quit fucking altogether so they have more time to work. Because, from what I can tell, Matt’s right and the entire low birthrate panic goes straight back to people who are looking for any excuse to claim that women’s rights have to be revoked for the good of the world. But in order to believe that more children automatically means more wealth because it’s more labor, you have to both ignore the fact that it means less labor (because you take so many women out of the labor pool), but you also have to assume that the only thing that creates wealth is labor, and resources have nothing to do with it. Which is easy to believe if you’re already wealthy enough to shield yourself from the pains of growing prices on all sorts of items, from real estate to gas to food, caused by heightened demand, but for the rest of us, not so much.
Kids are also part of the American dream just like a big car and house in the suburbs, the problem being that all those things are enviromentally damaging and less fulfilling than people think they are. Also, they are expensive in the form of roads and fire protection for the burbs and more schools for the little bundles of joy. The government should do whatever it can to discourage people from having kids, this means making all forms of birth control readily available, mandating real sex education(not abstinence only) in any school that recieves federal money and ending tax advantages for people that have large families, and yes, an end to fertility research and treatment.