The Enlightenment began the process that turned off the light in the human soul.

I’d take his claim one step further, though, and suggest that Europe’s present incapacities – including the demographic suicide that is stripping the continent of population at a rate unseen since the Black Death in the 14th century – are related to its Christophobia.

No, its related to basic, pocketbook family economics. From an article in Foreign Affairs last year:

(see: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83307/phillip-longman/the-global-baby-bust.html?mode=print)

Today, the average woman in the world bears half as many children as did her counterpart in 1972. No industrialized country still produces enough children to sustain its population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging. Germany could easily lose the equivalent of the current population of what was once East Germany over the next half-century. Russia's population is already contracting by three-quarters of a million a year. Japan's population, meanwhile, is expected to peak as early as 2005, and then to fall by as much as one-third over the next 50 years -- a decline equivalent, the demographer Hideo Ibe has noted, to that experienced in medieval Europe during the plague.

Although many factors are at work, the changing economics of family life is the prime factor in discouraging childbearing. In nations rich and poor, under all forms of government, as more and more of the world's population moves to urban areas in which children offer little or no economic reward to their parents, and as women acquire economic opportunities and reproductive control, the social and financial costs of childbearing continue to rise.

In the United States, the direct cost of raising a middle-class child born this year through age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture, exceeds $200,000 -- not including college. And the cost in forgone wages can easily exceed $1 million, even for families with modest earning power. Meanwhile, although Social Security and private pension plans depend critically on the human capital created by parents, they offer the same benefits, and often more, to those who avoid the burdens of raising a family.

And its not just in the developed world. Everybody is experiencing a global baby bust:

Today, when Americans think of Mexico, for example, they think of televised images of desperate, unemployed youths swimming the Rio Grande or slipping through border fences. Yet because Mexican fertility rates have dropped so dramatically, the country is now aging five times faster than is the United States. It took 50 years for the American median age to rise just five years, from 30 to 35. By contrast, between 2000 and 2050, Mexico's median age, according to UN projections, will increase by 20 years, leaving half the population over 42. Meanwhile, the median American age in 2050 is expected to be 39.7.

Those televised images of desperate, unemployed youth broadcast from the Middle East create a similarly misleading impression. Fertility rates are falling faster in the Middle East than anywhere else on earth, and as a result, the region's population is aging at an unprecedented rate. For example, by mid-century, Algeria will see its median age increase from 21.7 to 40, according to UN projections. Postrevolutionary Iran has seen its fertility rate plummet by nearly two-thirds and will accordingly have more seniors than children by 2030.

Countries such as France and Japan at least got a chance to grow rich before they grew old. Today, most developing countries are growing old before they get rich. China's low fertility means that its labor force will start shrinking by 2020, and 30 percent of China's population could be over 60 by mid-century. More worrisome, China's social security system, which covers only a fraction of the population, already has debts exceeding 145 percent of its GDP.

Its got nothing to do with de-Christianization (neither Japan, Iran or China are remotely Christian societies) or even secularization (Iran remains fundamentalist Muslim, Communist China was always offically atheist), or hedonism, selfishness, moral decay or tooth decay. However, the economic and political consequences or an aging society are dire (read the entire article). And if "Peak Oil" becomes a reality, the combination of bankrupt pension systems and the end of cheap energy will combine to make the perfect economic storm.

However (and this should warm the cockles of your heart OJ) religious communities appear to be bucking the trend:

Today there is a strong correlation between religious conviction and high fertility. In the United States, for example, fully 47 percent of people who attend church weekly say that the ideal family size is three or more children, as compared to only 27 percent of those who seldom attend church. In Utah, where 69 percent of all residents are registered members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, fertility rates are the highest in the nation. Utah annually produces 90 children for every 1,000 women of childbearing age. By comparison, Vermont -- the only state to send a socialist to Congress and the first to embrace gay civil unions -- produces only 49. Does this mean that the future belongs to those who believe they are (or who are in fact) commanded by a higher power to procreate? Based on current trends, the answer appears to be yes.

So while irreligion is not the cause, the costs of raising kids in an urban environment is the true villian, high levels of religious faith do lead couples to defy the economic consequences of having large families. However, as I mentioned before religious devotion is typically a result of living in rural areas to being with.

daniel:

Yeah, raising kids takes more now than when most of us lived at suibsistence level. The idea is asinine.

europe, for the most part, gives families all kinds of cash and benefits -- including that vaunted health care. so cost isn't the issue, there. also, how come poor countries often have good birth rates ? and why didn't sharks die out with the aquatic dinosaurs, if it was an environmental cause ?

cjm-

Govt's don't give without first taking. After the vigorish it's not a good deal. Taxes are too high for many families due to all the 'giving'.

daniel: I don't think any of the "trends" you discuss are meaningful. Europe is a technologically advanced, mostly urban, post-religion society with shockingly low birthrates. Most of the rest of the world is less technologically advanced, more religious, with higher birthrates, level of urban-ness varies. I don't see that a few societies on one planet is enough to correlate birthrate with religion, urban-ness or anything else. My own bias from personal experience is that the left, non-religious segment of society doesn't believe in their own culture and hence have no reason to reproduce. Plus the left, non-religious segment of society tends to be amazingly narcissistic and self-obsessed, which is incompatible with the sacrifices required for raising children. Sure, the rates have dropped from ~7 to ~3 in more religious areas, but I'd argue that that drop is qualitatitely different from the further drop to ~1 (I wonder what the median value is in Europe, as opposed to the mean...).

tomc: you're right, but given that they take the taxes anyway, the extra benefits for having kids do offset the cost of having kids, just not enough to change anyone's mind. 'b' is right, it's all about lifestyle choices.

Daniel:

Interesting quote. Do you know of any correlation between tax and fertility rates?

b:

Why is the drop qualitatively different? I have a hard time seeing how the religious are doing anything other than getting to the same fertility rate slightly later.

OJ:

Before you call the idea asinine, perhaps you should review the concept of "opportunity cost."

Jeff:

Yes, I agree that Marxists and Libertarians and others who see life as economic may choose not to have children for selfish reasons. Americans aren't.

Yeah, raising kids takes more now than when most of us lived at suibsistence level.

In preindustrial subsistence level socieites a woman who bears 12 kids could expect maybe 3 to survive into adult houd. Today, a woman with with 3 kids can expect all 3 to survive. The Darwinian rationale for having large families has been eliminated by modern medicine.

The idea is asinine.

Foreign Affairs is assinine? The fact that all societies, religious or secular, have experienced plumetting birth rates is assinine? Theocratic Iran, Communist/atheist China, secular France and even the Mormons have seen birth rates drop and continue downward. Given that everybody, no matter what their level of religious devotion, is having a baby bust - what does religion (or lack there of) have to do with it?

I guess "assinine" must be shorthand for "I can't think of a logical counter argument or dispute the facts, so I'll just resort to name calling."

daniel: I don't think any of the "trends" you discuss are meaningful. Europe is a technologically advanced, mostly urban, post-religion society with shockingly low birthrates. Most of the rest of the world is less technologically advanced, more religious, with higher birthrates, level of urban-ness varies. I don't see that a few societies on one planet is enough to correlate birthrate with religion, urban-ness or anything else. My own bias from personal experience is that the left, non-religious segment of society doesn't believe in their own culture and hence have no reason to reproduce. Plus the left, non-religious segment of society tends to be amazingly narcissistic and self-obsessed, which is incompatible with the sacrifices required for raising children. Sure, the rates have dropped from ~7 to ~3 in more religious areas, but I'd argue that that drop is qualitatitely different from the further drop to ~1 (I wonder what the median value is in Europe, as opposed to the mean...).

Now pay attention OJ,this is an example of an intelligent counter argument.

While not disputing your observations, b, I would point out that the historical trend lines have shows that every group that has seen its birth rates drop from 7 to 3 continues its drop to 2 or less. This is true of the Islamic faithful in Tunisia as well as lefty intellectuals in France. There is no reason to expect that anyone, except possible self-isolated reigious societies like the Amish or Hasidic Jews, will escape this trend.

I do recommend that the Foreign Affairs article be completely read by everyone. It makes it clear that a long term baby-bust and a graying population are economic disasters. Others have come to the same conclusion.

Neither capitalism nor socialism are sustainable under conditions of declining population, aging demographics and declining birth rates. That is the conclusion of an article in Policy Review by Stanley Kurtz (see http://www.policyreview.org/feb05/kurtz.html) summarizing the findings of recent books and studies on the effects of depopulation and declining birth rates on economic growth and social pension programs. Both the free market and the welfare state assume continued population growth. Remove that growth, and both state run programs and private enterprise collapse as economic activity grinds to a halt:

Growing population has driven the economy, sustained the welfare state, and shaped modern culture. A declining population could conceivably put the dynamic of modernization into doubt. ... Population decline is by no means restricted to the industrial world. Remarkably, the sharp rise in American fertility rates at the height of the baby boom — 3.8 children per woman — was substantially above Third World fertility rates today. From East Asia to the Middle East to Mexico, countries once fabled for their high fertility rates are now falling swiftly toward or below replacement levels. ... Now children will become a small minority, and society's central problem will be caring for the elderly. Yet even this assumes that societies consisting of elderly citizens at levels of 20, 30, even 40 or more percent can sustain themselves at all. That is not obvious.

Note that this is a world wide phenomena, so there will be no Camp of the Saints scenario as industrialized nations are swamped by refugees from an over populated Third World. Even the uber-liberal society of Holland has considering restrictions on Muslim immigration after the murder of Theo VanGogh. While this may help preserve European culture, it begs the question: where is Europe going to get future workers from? The economy of the United States, though less vulnerable, is also endangered by the direct and indirect effects of world wide depopulation.

Many have likened government welfare programs such as Social Security to Ponzi schemes that fall apart once the number of new people signing on to the program drops significantly. What has not been mentioned is that the capitalistic free market is no less a Ponzi scheme:

Population growth, he argues, drove the Industrial Revolution, and there has never been economic growth under conditions of population decline. Thus, for example, he ascribes Japan's current economic troubles to its declining fertility. ... Both Longman and Wattenberg raise the question of whether markets need population growth in order to thrive. As Wattenberg puts the point, it hardly makes sense to invest in a business whose pool of potential customers is shrinking. ... In the absence of serious reform, we may be in for an economic "hard landing." Peterson, Kotlikoff, and Burns warn of a spiraling financial crisis that could even lead to worldwide depression. Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker sees a 75 percent chance of an economic crisis of some sort within the next five years.

Philip Longman in his book The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It, suggests that we cut Social Security taxes for those who are raising children, on the grounds that they, unlike their childless contemporaries, are making investments in the future viability of the Social Security system by rearing and educating children. As Longman points out, "...human beings have created an environment that is negative for childbirth. There is a demand for human capital, but there is almost no reward for it. So people have fewer children.. In days past, it made sense to have as many children as possible in order to provide for old age. The divorcing of old age security from direct child rearing results in a variation of the classic "Tragedy of the Commons", with other peoples kids (still necessary for the viability of the pension system) being the Commons.

Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future, by Ben Wattenberg; makes a more sober, even sanguine, evaluation. Nations with low fertility rates, meanwhile, will face major fiscal and political problems. In a pay-as-you-go pension system, for example, there will be fewer workers to finance the pensions of retirees; people will either have to pay more in taxes or work longer. Ben Wattenberg probably has the most credibility on this issue, since he raised the alarm concerning declining population years ago when most people were still thinking in terms of over population. His book "Birth Dearth" is the first serious attempt to address this problem and examine its economic implications.

The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America's Economic Future by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns paint an unremittingly bleak picture of the coming economic crisis. In 1950, there were 16.5 workers per Social Security beneficiary. That ratio fell to 3.4 by 2000. By the time the last baby boomers retire in 2030, there will be only two covered workers per beneficiary. According to Kotlikoff and Burns, there is nothing that can be done to divert this storm, not technology, not a sale of national assets, not capital deepening, not delayed retirement, not immigration, not even privatization.

So if these gentlemen are correct, what does the future hold? One is tempted to think of once mighty Japan and its now permanent state of recession tied to its falling population. According to Paul Krugman, Japan's declining population has caught them in a liquidity trap:

If Japan is in a liquidity trap, however, why?... the obvious answer is demography... Japan's troubles really stem from a deadly interaction between demography and ideology. Here's the story: Japan, like the United States only much more so, is an aging society. Thanks to a declining birth rate and negligible immigration, it faces a steady decline in its working-age population for at least the next several decades while retirees increase. Given this prospect, the country should save heavily to make provision for the future--and lacking the kind of pay-as-you-go Social Security system that allows Americans to ignore such realities, it does. But investment opportunities in Japan are limited, so that businesses will not invest all those savings even at a zero interest rate. And as anyone who has read John Maynard Keynes can tell you, when desired savings consistently exceed willing investment, the result is a permanent recession.

What will happen to even wealthy societies when their population densities drop below a critical mass? Apparently the social bonds that hold communities together fray and fall apart at that point. One can imagine a bottoming out where economic conditions are so dire, urbanization is no longer sustainable and newly ruralized populations rediscover that children on the farm are economic assets.

Marxists and Libertarians and others who see life as economic may choose not to have children for selfish reasons.

I guess that makes 99% of humanity Marxist or Libertarian. It's not "selfish" to want to avoid living in a poverty caused by having more kids than you can afford.

We aren't. We're a religious society. Islam won't. It is too.

We aren't. We're a religious society.

We're a religious society outside of our urban areas (like everybody else throughout history). Unfortunately for Europe and Japan there is no "outside". By historical standards they are both urbanized to the point really being just very large "cities"

Islam won't. It is too.

Islam already has. Some Islamic countries like Tunisia are already below replacement levels. The birth rates of the others are plumetting and will also soon be below replacement. Which means no Islamic hordes swamping Europe (did you even bother to read the article or do you want to avoid having reality intrude on your preconceptions?).

Yes, they aren't we.

Poverty?

OJ:

Poverty is relative.

Regardless of religion, fertility is falling everywhere.

Daniel:

Your citations seem to gloss over a couple things: Productivity gains, for one. Regarding investment, people will invest in companies facing declining markets if there is no alternative. Finally, Japan may yet face an economic crisis due to declining population, but so fas as I know, that decline, while definitely in the cards, has not yet started.

Jeff:

Yes, the secular consider children to impoverish them.

Jeff:

Well, it seems that the drop from ~7 to ~3 can be attributed mostly to improvements in public health, since one reason for having so many kids is that a very large fraction didn't make it to adulthood before modern medicine. Some is attributed to economic changes, such as changing from an agricultural economy where kids are an economic asset from a very young age, to a more urban setting where they are not, but in subsistence farming there must come a point fairly quickly where the cost of feeding child #n is more than the incremental improvement in your crop yield from that one additional child. I suppose I would lean towards the former being more important, but I'm sure I could find lots of expert opinion for the latter. I confess that I don't understand the desire to have just 1 child (I was one of 3, my wife one of 5, and we have VERY different political and religious backgrounds). It just seems to me to require a cultural shift to have the majority of people want 1 instead of 2-3, whereas the previous drop does not.

Yes, the secular consider children to impoverish them.

When it comes to balancing the family budget, everyone is secular. How else do you explain that EVERYBODY, including Mormons, are seeing and continue to see falling birth rates.

Your citations seem to gloss over a couple things: Productivity gains, for one. Regarding investment,

If stock prices tank, how will companies attract the investment needed for further productivity gains? And not only does productivity have to increase to compensate for labor shortages (which is problematical) per capita consumption has to increase to compensate for dwindling markets. An excess of production over consumption equals recession, or depression. How many SUVs, yachts and houses will a person have to buy in order to keep the system functioning?

people will invest in companies facing declining markets if there is no alternative.

If things get bad enough, they'll put it in their mattress. Actually, in a deflationary situation with stock prices falling and the real estate market collapsing due to depopulation, putting your money in a savings account looks relatively attractive.

Finally, Japan may yet face an economic crisis due to declining population, but so fas as I know, that decline, while definitely in the cards, has not yet started.

I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree. IMHO Japan is already in an economic crisis brought on by depopulation and a graying society.

Now I'm not an economist (I don't even play one on TV), but I have run a business. I've tried to imagine being a business owner in a depopulation scenario. Every year, my customer base gets smaller and my labor costs increase in real terms. Productivity increases may compensate for labor shortages, or maybe not. There is an argument that the productivity increases in the 90s weren't real. And its not a given that these increases will keep pace with declining labor or even continue at all. I can't see sustaining necessary profit margins under those circumstances.

Multiply this situation by thousands of companies big and small in the same no-win/no-profit situation and explain to me how capitalism can survive, let alone thrive. There is no such thing as no growth capitalism. The only "growth" for businesses of the depopulated future would be paper earnings generated by repeated mergers.

No, I can't see capitalism surviving under depopulation. What I see is a permanent recession.

b:

The one is a trophy.

Daniel Duffy -- I agree with many of the details of what you say (something of a surprise, since I rarely do agree with you at all), but I still think you are being reductive when when you insist that pocketbook economics IS the whole story, and religion isn't any part of it at all. You rightly point out that all the countries that are suffering plummeting birth rates are different in their religions or lack thereof, but you seem to gloss over the fact that they have different economic systems as well. You might argue that their systems are all roughly free market systems, but that's not really true. The free market in the US is vastly different, as experienced by the person on the ground, than the nanny statism of Europe, or the crony capitalism of Communist China. I've lived, worked and gone to school in literally over a dozen countries on almost every continent, including mainland China and in both East and West Africa, and I can tell you that the "pocketbook economics" affects ordinary people very differently from country to country, in terms of the ease of doing business, of upholding contracts, of levels of taxation and take-home pay, the supply of consumer goods, and every other basic you could name.
So don't you think that your complete dismissal of religion as a cause is too simplistic? I think a sort of loss of faith in the next world has been a tremendous factor, a sort of global disease. The Chinese (I'm half Chinese, born in Taiwan) may not mostly adhere to Western religions, but traditional Chinese society, grounded in the universal Chinese "religion" of ancestor reverence and filial piety, placed an enormous emphasis on the importance of having children, both in this world and the next. (In fact, the it's not overstating it to say that Chinese culture held that the single most important thing one could do in life was to have children. People without children were the "hungry ghosts" of the spirit world, with no one to tend their graves or bring grave offerings.) With the pulverization of traditional Chinese culture/religion by atheistic Communism, which forbade any notion of a "next world" and at its most enthusiastic encouraged the destruction of tombs and family temples, AND topped off by the enforced adherence to the "one child" policy, most Chinese people in China have been reduced to the most materialistic baseline. There's no respect for the past, and for the first time EVER in Chinese history, old people are left on their own to fend for themselves, instead of living near or with their families, and you have wealthy young people in China who don't even want to have their one allotted child, because they like having money and freedom to go out to eat and to nightclub etc.
I also don't entirely agree with your religious rural/secular urban analysis. I live in NYC -- Manhattan specifically -- and I think it's more accurate to say that the secular has a higher profile in a city, because that's where the elites gather. The elites control the dominant narrative in the city. But the churches and temples in NYC are routinely thronged with worshippers, and storefront evangelical operations abound even in Manhattan. You may be right about general tendencies, but it's no quite as schematic as all that.

Lisa - Thanks for a thought provoking analysis. You're right, I committed the sin of countering OJ's simplicity (its all religion) with simplicity of my own (its all economics). You're also right that there is a complex interaction of religion, secularism, rural, urban, macroeconomics and microeconomics. In my defense I plead the desire to provide a counter balance to the prevailing viewpoint on the thread.

China is an extremely interesting case. I'm surprised that you left out any mention of the "boy bomb" (gender selction of boys by villagers limited to only one child). This gender imbalance can only create severe social distortions in the near future. And as was previously mentioned, at least Western Europe and Japan got rich before they got gray. China has not been so fortunate. Despite what you see in the glossy busines magazines, the bulk of China's population consists of desparately poor peasants.

Yet what else could China as a society do? What is the carrying capacity of that part of east Asia? 2 billion? 5 billion? 10 billion? As some point there would be a massive Malthusian population correction. When does east Asia's ecosystem collapse (see "Our Real China Problem" in the Atlantic Monthly for a description of how bad China's environment has been polluted)? That's not a pretty thought for a nation armed with nukes.

However, given all the the economic and social stresses affecting China (a classic case of "new wine in old goatskins") it is doubtful that China will maintain its present unity. Either the provinces will achieve defacto autonomy from the central government ("The mountain is high and the Emperor is far away") or China will enter another cycle of disunity or possibly warlordism. Again not a pretty thought for a nation with nukes.

Everyone has heard the old Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times". Things are about to get very interesting.

daniel:

of course it isn't all one thing--but the religious have economics while the materialists don't have religion.

Daniel: What else could the Chinese do? Don't you answer your own question? They could drop the last remnants of communist economic regulation, lose the party, open up their economy, become democratic, and get rich and free. Also, let's not pretend that male sex selection was an unforeseeable consequence of the one-child policy.

Daniel:

In mentioning productivity gains, it is worthwhile noting that economic output has hugely outstripped population growth over the last twenty years; there is no reason to believe it impossible that fewer people getting paid more per head for less time at work will lead to greater net disposable income, and time, despite there being fewer heads.

And while there may be a limit, somewhere to what we spend our money on, there doesn't seem to be a limit to the hedonistic (BMW v. Hyundai; travel v. stay at home; yacht v. rowboat) element of acquisition.

My reference to Japan was ambiguous--I meant that there has to be an different explanation other than population for Japan's stagnation, since the population has not yet, though it will, start decreasing.

But those are quibbles. Your demonstration that significant fertility reduction always attends modernization, and is therefore a secular (in the economic sense of the word) phenomena is very convincing.

It actually decreased last year (technically)

daniel:

Thanks for all your hard work, but does putting such emphasis on economics jibe with your everyday experience? Have you ever heard a friend say that he and his wife were saving up to have a child? Ever hear a lottery winner say he planned to pay off the mortgage, go on a trip and have three more kids? Sure, lots of modern types will blame enonomic uncertainty for remaining childless, but what else would they say--that they are too self-centered?

The other one that gets me is the old shibboleth about how people used to have a lot of kids to provide for security in their old age. If that is what they thought, they were the most economically challenged folks in history.