Tuesday, January 03, 2006
The sharpest sentence of the young new year
One of Princeton's half-dozen conservatives sent me Mark Steyn's essay on the West's demographic crisis, which I had seen linked elsewhere over the last couple of days but not yet clicked through. It contains a line that may ultimately stand as one of the most inciteful utterances of 2006:
Scroll down a bit and you get to the mathematical heart of the matter:
There has been an interesting shift in American politics in the last forty years. It used to be that it was the wealthy Wall Street Republicans who were worried about excess fertility. Planned Parenthood raised a lot of money back in the day from WASPs who read the Club of Rome Report or just thought the world was getting crowded. Today, though, it is the political left that doesn't believe that when it comes to people, more is better.
UPDATE: And don't miss this bit from the same Steyn essay:
Indeed.
The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it.
Scroll down a bit and you get to the mathematical heart of the matter:
And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?
Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.
There has been an interesting shift in American politics in the last forty years. It used to be that it was the wealthy Wall Street Republicans who were worried about excess fertility. Planned Parenthood raised a lot of money back in the day from WASPs who read the Club of Rome Report or just thought the world was getting crowded. Today, though, it is the political left that doesn't believe that when it comes to people, more is better.
UPDATE: And don't miss this bit from the same Steyn essay:
I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to choose," Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!"
Indeed.
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