The Baby Bust: When Goldberg Shunned Malthus

Whenever a new stat comes out, people with agendas try to figure out how to use it to their advantage. It usually reveals more about the person doing the interpreting than the stat to be interpreted. And so it is with America’s birthrate.

Last week, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that America’s birthrate reached a historic low in 2017, falling to 60.2 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age. For a population in the developed world to replace itself, the average woman needs to have around 2.1 children. In the United States, where fertility has been below replacement for about a decade, the average woman now has 1.77.

The stat shows that we’re not having enough children to maintain our population. In the late 1960s, there was a push for this outcome, called Zero Population Growth, premised on the belief that our birthrate was unsustainable and would result in starvation and devastation of resources. There was a time when people had oodles of kids, given high mortality rates and the need to milk the cows and plow the back 40. These are both now social anachronisms. 

Is this even a problem? What difference does it make if Americans are making enough babies to sustain the population? Is there something so special about our babies that the babies of people from other countries aren’t as good?

Some liberals might wonder why we should worry about birthrates at all. Anxiety about demographic decline has a bad odor; historically it’s been a preoccupation of people panicked by changing gender roles and the waning racial advantage of particular groups. But if a shrinking number of workers must support a growing elderly population, even our threadbare social safety net will be strained. An obvious solution is increased immigration, but declining native-born populations tend to react to large influxes of immigrants with terrifying xenophobic backlashes.

There are a couple landmines buried in the dogma, notably the belief of the social safety net supporting a “growing elderly population.” Goldberg’s ideology precludes her from uttering the obvious, that the social safety net that relieved people from preparing for their future, combined with prolonged life without prolonged ability to be productive or even enjoy it, is unsustainable under any circumstances. It was always a pyramid scheme, but the magic of government providing for the downtrodden, even of their own making, trumps the numbers.

And so the pyramid scheme will fail if we don’t produce enough warm bodies to feed money into the welfare state to pay for the promises made. We need more working young people making money to give to old people who live beyond their expiration date. And the girls aren’t cranking out the requisite babies. Apparently, importing Mexican babies isn’t good enough for Goldberg, as she erases it from her solution. She blames it on xenophobes, but would rather fight a different battle.

While the birthrate numbers may be factual, the reason behind them is subject to dispute. Abortion foes blame their go-to nemesis, but the facts fail them. Michelle Goldberg offers a more woke theory: the Patriarchy.

I have another theory. Perhaps the United States is becoming more like the rest of the industrialized world, where declining birthrates are correlated with a lack of support for working mothers.

Most women seem to want both jobs and children, and when they’re forced to choose, some will forgo parenthood, or have only one child.

It’s a curious choice, to prefer the workforce over parenting, given how so many women view the workplace. Rampant sexual harassment and assault. Dismissive attitudes and constant interruptions. Lack of appreciation and the dreaded wage gap. This is preferable to having children? It’s one thing to argue that it’s necessary to eat, but that’s not Goldberg’s premise so she leaves it out.

After cherry-picking a few European countries, and quoting some obscure theorists, Goldberg leaps to her conclusion.

Right now, America’s fertility rate is still pretty high compared to most European countries; it’s lower than France or Sweden but roughly in line with other countries in Scandinavia. If my theory is right, though, it will keep falling unless America invests in paid family leave and subsidized, high-quality child care, while birthrates in France and Scandinavia remain stable.

The push for paid family leave and subsidized, high-quality child care is understandable. It would make things far easier for women to both work and have children. It would alleviate the burden on young families to deal with the pressures their parents and grandparents faced. And like the fuzzy math that supports the social safety net, it will magically be paid for by writing blank checks or the deep pockets of every employer who makes bundles of money off their serfs and hoards it for retirement.

Yet, there is another statistic that Goldberg fails to add into her mix, that the marriage rate, like the birthrate, is also falling precipitously. And the divorce rate is too darn high. Young people spend their non-working hours reading about the misery of identity groups on Instagram instead of dating, falling in love, finding someone to spend their lives with and getting married. And then having, you know, babies.

Women blame men for being too awful and rapey to date. Men aren’t having as much fun with it either, even though it has yet to occur to women whose lean-in group tells them they’re all beautiful and fierce that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t as much of a catch as they want to believe they are. Nor are the guys, who mewl a bit too much because they’re told to be allies rather than gentlemen.

Does the declining birthrate really matter? To the extent social engineering relies upon assumptions like enough young people to work, make good money and pay taxes to provide for all the freebies that would support the well-intended if economically-challenged schemes to make their world fabulous, it’s very important.

But Michelle Goldberg’s failure to grasp that correlation doesn’t prove causation doesn’t prevent her positing a theory to attain the gifts that best suit her goals and beliefs, the benefit her tribe. It’s now left to her clansman, Rube, to create a machine that makes it happen. Why must it always be the guys who have to make the gals’ dreams come true?

17 thoughts on “The Baby Bust: When Goldberg Shunned Malthus

  1. Mike G.

    Why must it always be the guys who have to make the gals’ dreams come true?

    Well, it is a Man’s world, after all. We invented everything in it and get the blame for all it’s problems.

      1. Xchixm

        The ladies can pop out living things. I’d say that’s pretty amazing, though it seems many ladies undervalue the miracle.

        1. Hunting Guy

          Heinlein again times two.

          “Nursing does not diminish the beauty of a woman’s breasts; it enhances their charm by making them look lived in and happy.”

          “If the universe has any purpose more important than topping
          a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty
          help, I’ve never heard of it.”

  2. Xchixm

    My daughter is the only one of her generation within our family who is having children. She’s on her fourth of her own and her husband has two kids from previous relationships.

    We depended on my wife’s parents (the babies’ great-grandparents) to babysit the kids, since they were young enough to do it and retired, while our daughter attended college and worked afterwards.

    It’s a shame that’s not an option for every couple or single mother, but it has been a major blessing to have such a wonderful opportunity. It should be encouraged.

    Perhaps that could be part of the solution, too. Capable elderly people who are capable and willing should be encouraged to be babysitters and provided an additional source of income. I don’t care for the idea of nationally subsidized babysitting; but I also know how convincing American women can be when they demand something, so I know it’s inevitable in spite of how extravagant it is.

    Plus, what great-grandparent wouldn’t want the joy of babysitting kiddos, even if it’s not their own blood? I am hopeful to retire and watch my own great-grandkids the more I spend time with our grandkids and watch them grow up too fast.

    1. SHG Post author

      Does this mean you didn’t get the point of the post, you want to promote traditional values/solutions or you just wanted to tell your story? It’s unclear.

  3. B. McLeod

    I thought she wanted the Patriarchy to stop screwing women. Some people can never be happy.

  4. Nemo

    The simplest rule of thumb for use of statistics: Show or Tell? If the writer is showing something, the stats are probably ok. However, if the author is telling you something, making a case or argument based on or dependent upon a stat or two, they will be misleading unless proven otherwise. The source article qualifies as a textbook case of this RoT.

    Goldberg used a conclusion that she could more or less link to the stat, and proceeded from there. The misuse of the stat renders the entire article meaningless. QED

    Regards,

    N

  5. Zack

    Let me see if I’ve got this straight: some people are making the wrong choice not to have children, so we need to offer the people who are having children more nice things (paid for somehow) in hope that some wrong people will change their minds and decide to take on children in order to get more nice things? If there’s even a chance of this working, isn’t it still extraordinarily inefficient? I guess it is hard to tell who will only have children if you make it easier and more monetarily rewarding for them…

    1. SHG Post author

      Or maybe it’s children too concerned with themselves, their convenience, their own aspirations, to be mature enough have children of their own.

      1. Christenson

        Or maybe, just maybe, the *internet* (after women’s lib) has offered women more interesting opportunities than having babies?

        My purely anecdotal impression from my own daughter is also that adulthood for this generation is significantly delayed, and we have all been learning that adults are the ones that should have PLANNED children. How can I plan for a kid when I’m barely scraping by? Also, as we accept sexual relationships and orientations other than male trying to impregnate female, and allow even those to be non-procreative through birth control, the balance of reproduction has been altered.

        Finally, the social safety net itself reduces the need to have children to support me in my old age. That is, I’ve got this nice retirement account…so I personally don’t have to have children for when I get too old to work!

        On the other side of the coin, there’s little scientific doubt of a causal relationship between the population, the CO2 emissions, and climate change making the current population likely not sustainable. Nobody’s a fan of murdering folks, so its better not to have the babies in the first place!

        1. SHG Post author

          Those are the excuses. Excuses are almost as good as achievements if you’re good with failure.

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