under-population..?

recently, an attending at the county hospital suggested a book to me. i read parts of the book and found it to be interesting, but with a definite agenda. his central premise is that while muslim countries have not embraced a birth-control and secularist life-model, they continue to have far more children than the rest of the developed world and will soon take over europe on the basis of sheer numbers. funny then, to find the new york times magazine recently speaking on the same subject. they give steyn his due in the article, but certainly place a pro-secularistic spin on the issue by the end of the 10 page article. the times magazine shows in stark fashion that europeans are headed for precipitous declines in their state populations not many years from now...

meanwhile, there is much animosity in the hotly contested culture wars of the united states. at the heart of the mormon culture is the idea of a divinely mandated injunction to have children. while at rachel's wedding over the weekend, jonathan's dad mentioned this 'scriptural injunction' in passing at the wedding rehearsal/dinner.

certainly, with recent events in our house the subject of fertility has been at the forefront of our thoughts..:) certainly as birth control has become more socially acceptable in the mormon culture (ie. not a damnable offense...) it would seem that US mormon families have trended smaller. i don't have hard numbers to back this up, but certainly amongst our friends of a similar age this seems to hold true. regardless, mormons sit well above the national average in terms of the average US birthrate (2.1)and show no signs of slowing to that level anytime soon.

so with that introduction, i give you some sage words from the ny times magazine. i give you these words since many of you don't like to follow my links:) you don't have to read the words (obviously), but i will spice up the journey with some recent photos of our bundles of joy...interspersed with random asides.

In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data...The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level...For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3...At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”

this 'lowest-low' fertility is an fascinating idea. it may certainly bode for massive worldwide population shifts in the not-to-distant future...


bekah seems unconcerned here as she crawls from the ikea igloo...

...Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European.

speaking of fertility...



social conservatives tie the low birthrate to secularism. After arguing for decades that the West had divorced itself from God and church and embraced a self-interested and ultimately self-destructive lifestyle, abetted above all by modern birth control, they feel statistically vindicated...In Germany, where the births-to-deaths ratio now results in an annual population loss of roughly 100,000...

has the 'scriptural injunction' been ignored by the secular european hordes and thus bodes their downfall? or have they smartly stemmed an unsustainable world population that will allow them to better manage their local resources..?


one thing michael knows is that ella enjoyed her first car-ride.

The Canadian conservative Mark Steyn, author of the 2006 best seller “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It,” has warned his fellow North Americansegarding their European allies, “These countries are going out of business,” and that while at the end of the 21st century there may “still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands,” these will “merely be designations for real estate.”

is this alarmist?


the girls enjoyed using the bells on their new trikes to alarm those in their way to watch out...

According to a paper by Jonathan Grant and Stijn Hoorens of the Rand Europe research group: “Demographers and economists foresee that 30 million Europeans of working age will ‘disappear’ by 2050. At the same time, retirement will be lasting decades as the number of people in their 80s and 90s increases dramatically.” The crisis, they argue, will come from a “triple whammy of increasing demand on the welfare state and health-care systems, with a decline in tax contributions from an ever-smaller work force.” That is to say, there won’t be enough workers to pay for the pensions of all those long-living retirees.

certainly a problem with the current health-care systems in europe...is this the model we want to adopt here in the US?


sounds like this problem would have been a great one to be addressed by the guy who signed this sweet shirt...thanks dad:)

When European women age 18 to 34 were asked in another study to state their ideal number of children, 16.6 percent of those in Germany and 12.6 percent in Austria answered “none.” (In Italy, by comparison, this figure was 3.8 percent.) The main reason seems to be a basic change in attitudes on the part of some women as to their “natural” role. According to Nikolai Botev, population and development adviser at the United Nations Population Fund, many observers have been surprised to find that in recent years “childlessness emerges as an ideal lifestyle.”

this idea of childlessness is certainly a viable option as never before in history...and gaining popularity in certain circles...


we certainly aren't pushing for abby to rely solely on some prince charming...but it sure is a fun photo.

“If we look at very recent data for developed countries, we see that Italy has two records that are maybe world records,” he said. “One, young people in Italy stay with their parents longer than maybe anywhere else. No. 2 is the percentage of children born after the parents turn 40. These factors are related, because if you have a late start, you tend not to have a second child, and especially not a third.”

italy sounds like a nice place to live...


these three would rather just read about italy right now.

...50 percent of Italian women work, compared with between 75 percent and 80 percent of women in Scandinavian countries. Despite its veneer of modernity, Italian society prefers women to stay at home after they become mothers, and the government reinforces this. There is little state-financed child care, especially for new mothers, and most newlyweds still find homes close to one or both sets of parents, the assumption being that the extended family will help raise the children. But this no longer works as it once did. “As couples tend to delay childbearing,” Aassve says, “the age gap between generations is widening, and in many cases grandparents, who would be the ones relied upon for child care, themselves become the ones in need of care.”

is the ideal answer state-financed child care? extended family care? parental care?


our kiddos are certainly grateful for their grandparents...

In Scandinavia, thanks in part to state support, the more children a family has, the wealthier it is likely to be, whereas in southern Europe having children is a financial sinkhole, which drags a family toward poverty. Such an analysis flies in the face of social conservatives, who argue that simply encouraging people to have more babies will raise the population and add fuel to the economic engine.

it's an interesting (false?) dichotomy here. it seems an artificial measure since this particular state subsidizes it's larger families where other countries don't...


michael here, subsidizing the star wars franchise.

“The world record for lowest-low fertility right now is South Korea, at 1.1, Japan is just about as low. What we are seeing in Asia is a phenomenon of the 2000s, rather than the 1990s...Western Europe, then, is not the isolated case that some make it out to be. It is simply the first region of the world to record extremely low birthrates.

will much of the world's population 'drop off a cliff'?


michael dropped off those glasses after finishing the new toy story ride at disneyland...

The old conservative argument — that a traditional, working husband and stay-at-home wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population — doesn’t apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It’s also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it’s also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

the opening sentence in this paragraph is again contradictory as he goes on to admit that many in the US do live this way...not all (and i'm not saying all should), but it is still a viable and common option.


michael found a car that vied for the lead in this race...

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”


bekah is perhaps not worried about acceptance here...

For there are those who argue that low birthrate in itself is not a problem at all. Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford scientist who warned us about the “population bomb” in the 1960s, is more certain than ever that the human race is catastrophically straining the planet. “It’s insane to consider low birthrate as a crisis,” he told me. “Basically every person I know in my section of the National Academy of Sciences thinks it’s wonderful that rich countries are starting to shrink their populations to sustainable levels. We have to do that because we’re wrecking our life-support systems.”

funny that the guy who contributed in a big way to much of the over-population hysteria is stubbornly hanging on to his beloved theory...or perhaps that same hysteria brought on eurasia's current state--on the brink of falling off a large populatory cliff of contraction. who's hysterical now..?


california adventure was certainly over-populated on this holiday season visit.

I put this to Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau, who monitors global fertility on a daily basis from his perch in Washington. Is it possible that these are basically “good problems,” that Europeans, having trimmed their birthrates, are actually on the right path? That all they have to do is adjust their economies, find creative ways to shrink their cities, get more young and old people into jobs, so that they can keep their pension and health-care systems functioning?

what do you think?


bekah finally decided to just crawl under a table and hide...

Haub wasn’t buying it. “Maybe tinkering with the retirement age and making other economic adjustments is good,” he said. “But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”

good point.


thanks for reading. a few new pictures for you. and your thoughts? are these concepts new to you? interesting? or a non-issue...