21. Chiral:
Credit or blame massive efficiency gains. Citizens can live completely modular lives at so little cost. Just pick your favorite template from Myspace or Blogspot, and you may feel like a unique individual. Perhaps even “special”.
Ironic how people who practice market-researched tribalism actually come out thinking “Now I am somebody, not just anybody!” It only requires scanning a ten-billion entry database to locate these interesting somebodies, using keywords that are not even slightly “key”.
However banal, when life is priced so low then why clutter your freedom with kids? Even if you breed, the personal cost is defrayed by entitlements like daycare and public schooling.
Of course don’t expect everyone to be satisfied with cookie-cutter reality. Leaders aren’t giving up their ultra-uniqueness just to be small but enlightened citizens of the world, just as they won’t let their kids go to public schools.
Apr 5, 2009 - 9:02 am
here is another gem. haven read the PDF yet but i think I will. Paragraph 6 really gets the mental gears turning.
28. johnclubvec:
It’s swell that somebody like the Financial Times is finally discussing the relationship between fertility and finances, but apparently everybody still wants to shy away from discussing the opposite relation: between finances and fertility. Undoubtedly, this is a far more neuralgic topic (because then we’d have to, you know, actually do something right now, like, in the present and all): the effect that fiscal policy has on fertility rates.
Along that line, I’m always happy to (re-)introduce analyst John D. Mueller to any audience. Demographers have known about the worldwide decline in fertility rates, well, even before Mark Steyn wrote about (yeah, that long!). And some pretty brainy people — demographers, political scientists, economists, even the odd (and I do mean odd) evolutionary psychologist, have tried to figure out the causes, and I’ve read most of their proposals. Even the people who propose them admit they’re not all that impressive — they don’t account for that much of the variance.
But then I stumble across Mr. Mueller, quoting St. Augustine, writing waaaaay over there in some obscure journal that nobody ever heard of, and his simple equation accounts for enormously more of the data than anybody’s, including those of Nobel prize winners.
Basically, Mr. Mueller says, it comes down to this. People have children because they love them — or because they love themselves. And fiscal policy — being as it introduces incentives and all — has predictable effects on just how much capacity (Wretchard might say, ‘design margin’) people have for loving children, versus for loving themselves.
His paper, “How Does Fiscal Policy Affect the American Worker?” shows that if the level of social benefits supplied by a government goes up too much, fertility declines, and also, if a government taxes labor income too much vis a vis property income, fertility declines then also. This is true world-wide; it’s not a local phenomenon. Also, frequency of worship is POSITIVELY related to fertility (not as causation necessarily, but because it’s an index of people’s capacity to love more than themselves). Here’s how he says it:
“Fertility is about equally inversely related to per capita social benefits and per capita national savings, but strongly, positively related to frequency of worship (an indicator of people’s preference for persons other than themselves). Thus, either allowing social benefits to rise as a share of national income (as Democrats propose) or forcing workers to save more by shifting the tax burden to labor income (as Republicans propose) would tip fertility below the replacement rate of about 2.1 children per couple. Combining these analyses leads to an important conclusion: To avoid both a fall in fertility below the replacement rate and a rise in the unemployment rate as in Europe, social benefits must not be permitted to grow as a share of national income and must continue to be financed by taxes on labor income, while government services benefiting both workers and property owners must be funded by an income tax that falls equally on labor and property income.”
Go to this link. Then find ‘View as pdf’ at the top right, click on that, follow the directions that pop up and download the pdf of the paper, and read the whole thing.
Apr 5, 2009 - 10:01 am
here is a pretty good comment from whiskey. it sort of sums up his usual points and makes a new observation as well about victorianism.
70. whiskey:
None of you are addressing the issue.WHY are Native Europeans, White Americans, Chinese in the coastal
regions, and Japanese not having kids? While Muslim and Mexican immigrants, in
the EU and US respectively, have many kids (none of whom have the least loyalty
to their host nations, quite the reverse they HATE them and the current White
majority).
Why?
Simple. Because women if given a choice will refuse to
have kids early, in their twenties, instead pursuing various Alpha men and
consumerism, “Sex and the City” as a lifestyle, what Kay Hymnowitz called the
“New Girl Order,” and that means at most a designer eugenic yuppie baby through
IVF sperm donors at age 39-45.
It’s as simple as that. Though Steyn fears PC
attacks for saying it (the usual label of “misogynist” for speaking the truth).
And the truth is no “evil force” of Gramscian Marxist academics, communist
subverters, or other “conspirators” caused this. It was inevitable as carpet
bombing of cities was in WWII once Orville and Wilbur Wright got off the ground
at Kitty Hawk.
Cheap, reliable contraception, anonymous urban living (no
social censure for living like the Sex and the City characters), and rising
incomes and status of women CREATED this. The only way it could have been
avoided was a deliberate attempt to create new institutions and mores to
counter-act this tendency.
Look at the English. Known throughout Europe’s
history as congenital drunkards, in Samuel Johnson’s days, most of English
people particularly in cities went about in drunken, gin-caused stupor. It was
not uncommon to step over the passed out form of a 12 year old prostitute, as
social mores and institutions collapsed in the movement away from rural areas
into the cities. Wretchard could read accounts of London in the 1770’s and match
it to the slums of Manila quite well.
The Victorians, starting in the 1830’s,
deliberately created Victorian, straight-laced morality, with strict limits on
boozing and sex, including substituting less powerful beer for the national
drink of Gin, lots of church going, endless promotion of the nuclear family and
joys of properly raising children, and brutal suppression of extra-marital
sex.
All to deal with the abuses of the Georgian era. It was for the most
part quite successful.
The West did not follow their example in the similar
great post-War social migrations and upheaval, and so has paid the price. No we
don’t have passed out twelve year old prostitutes even in fashionable areas of
great cities, but we do have widespread sexual and social behaviors simply
incompatible with the nuclear family and raising children.
It is THAT not
economics, or government intervention, or the Welfare State, or Gramscian
Marxist conspiracies, that caused the demographic collapse of the West. Give
people absolute social freedom and this is what you get.
Oh look! I made a comment!
93. El_Heffe:
whiskey#70
“Give people absolute social freedom and this is
what you get.”
correction: When people misuse absolute social freedom this is
what you get.
Freedom itself is inherently neither good nor bad, but it is a
necessary precondition for the greatest kinds of good. Freedom misused generally
devolves into freedom lost, captivity, misery, death. Freedom rightly used leads
to more freedom, happiness, life and ultimately will take men (individually and
collectively) to God.
Apr 7, 2009 - 3:13 pm
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