In 2006, Japan reached a demographic and social turning point. According to Tokyo’s official statistics, deaths that year very slightly outnumbered births. Nothing like this had been recorded since 1945, the year of Japan’s catastrophic defeat in World War II. But 2006 was not a curious perturbation. Rather, it was the harbinger of a new national norm.

Japan is now a “net mortality society.” Death rates today are routinely higher than birthrates, and the imbalance is growing. The nation is set to commence a prolonged period of depopulation. Within just a few decades, the number of people living in Japan will likely decline 20 percent. The Germans, who saw their numbers drop by an estimated 700,000 in just the years from 2002 to 2009, have a term for this new phenomenon: schrumpfende Gesellschaft, or “shrinking society.” Implicit in the phrase is the understanding that a progressive peacetime depopulation will entail much more than a lowered head count. It will inescapably mean a transformation of family life, social relationships, hopes and expectations—and much more.

But Japan is on the cusp of an even more radical demographic makeover than the one now under way in Germany and other countries that are in a similar situation, including Italy, Hungary, and Croatia. (The United States is also aging, but its population is still growing.) Within barely a generation, demographic trends promise to turn Japan into a dramatically—in some ways almost unimaginably—different place from the country we know today. If we go by U.S. Census Bureau projections for Japan, for example, there will be so many people over 100 years of age in 2040, and so few babies, that there could almost be one centenarian on hand to welcome each Japanese newborn.Population decline and extreme population aging will profoundly alter the realm of the possible for Japan—and will have major reverberations for the nation’s social life, economic performance, and foreign relations. Gradually but relentlessly, Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction. It is not clear that Japan’s path will be a harbinger of what lies ahead in other aging societies. Over the past century, modernization has markedly increased the economic, educational, technological, and social similarities between Japan and other affluent countries. However, Japan has remained distinctive in important respects—and in the years ahead it may become increasingly unlike other rich countries, as population change accentuates some of its all-but-unique attitudes and proclivities.

Japan’s future population profile has already very largely been set. Well over 75 percent of the people who will inhabit the Japan of 2040 are already alive, living there today. The country’s population trajectory will be driven by three fundamental and distinctively Japanese trends: (1) extremely favorable general health conditions—the Japanese now enjoy the world’s greatest longevity, and the outlook is for further improvements; (2) an unusually strong aversion to immigration; and (3) the most pronounced and prolonged period of sub-replacement fertility of any nation in the modern world. ...

But there is more. Japan’s historically robust (if perhaps at times stifling) family relations, a pillar of society in all earlier generations, stand to be severely and perhaps decisively eroded in the coming decades. Traditional “Asian family values”—the ideals of universal marriage and parenthood—are already largely a curiosity of the past in Japan. Their decay has set in motion a variety of powerful trends which virtually ensure that the Japan of 2040 will be a country with far greater numbers of aged isolates, divorced individuals, and adults whose family lines come to an end with them.

At its heart, marriage in traditional Japan was a matter of duty, not just love. Well within living memory, arranged marriages (miai) predominated, while “love matches” (renai kekkon) were anomalies. Love matches did not exceed arranged pairings until 1970—yet by 2005, only six percent of all new marriages fit the traditional mold. The collapse of arranged marriage seems to have taken something with it. Remarkably enough, there is a near perfect correlation between the demise of arranged marriage in Japan and the decline in postwar Japanese fertility.

Labels: aging, arranged marriage, children, demographics, divorce, immigration, Japan, Marriage

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Last week, The American published a piece by Eric Kaufmann on why the future will be more religious and conservative than we think. Kaufmann argues that there is a growing fertility advantage among more religious Americans, who tend to be more conservative. Kaufmann zeroes in on Hispanic and Asian population growth, which he argues will stabilize the share of nonreligious Americans at today’s levels.

Kaufmann’s analysis focuses largely on racial differences in religious identification. But when it comes to the shape of the future, looking to trends among the young may provide clearer insights. ...

While the PRRI survey shows a high degree of change among today’s Millennials, a Pew analysis of General Social Survey data shows they have a higher rate of unaffiliation than previous generations. Compared to their Baby Boom parents, Millennials (which Pew defines as ages 18 to 29) are twice as likely to list themselves as unaffiliated (26 to 13 percent). If the experience of early generations is a guide, levels of unaffiliation persist over time. The percentages of religiously unaffiliated members of the Greatest, Silent, Boomer, and Gen X generations have held remarkably constant over time. The level of unaffiliation among Millennials is therefore likely to remain high in the long run.

The proportion of young people who frequently attend worship services is also declining.

Labels: culture, demographics, race, religion

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...No country can afford to ignore a decline in its birthrate. In the long term, a nation's pension payments, power and very survival are at stake. To curb the drop in recent decades, some European governments have re-evaluated their family policies. Germany's example is especially instructive: Although the state's family policies are now among the most generous in Europe -- a parent who stays home with a child receives 67% of his or her current net income for up to 12 months -- they have failed to boost the birthrate or reverse the figures for childless women.

Germany's policies provide considerable financial help, but they essentially encourage mothers (recent figures show that only 15% of fathers take advantage of the leave) to quit the work force. Only an astonishing 14% of German mothers with one child in fact resume full-time work. Thus the family policies end up promoting the role of the father-provider, while mothers in effect feel the need to choose between family and work from the moment the first child is born, an especially risky proposition when one in three marriages ends in divorce.

In this situation, where a high number of mothers are able to stay at home but the birthrate remains exceptionally low, the message is clear: Women do not want policies that serve only to support mothers in their family life. For women to want children, they require policies that support the full range of their needs and roles and ambitions -- maternal, financial, professional.

The varying European experiences show that the highest birthrates exist in the countries with the highest rates of working women. It is, therefore, in society's interest to support working motherhood, which requires considerable public investment. Generous leave is not, by itself, an incentive. To raise more than one child, a mother must have access to high-quality, full-day child care, but that is still not enough. Income equality, flexible work hours and partners sharing family-related tasks -- these are the essential components that will allow women to be mothers without forgoing their other aspirations.

Labels: culture, demographics, Europe, Fathers, feminism, Germany, motherhood, natalism, work/family policy

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...My non-religious opposition to SSM comes from a Burkean point of view. That is, I do not believe that we should be so quick to revolutionize and to deconstruct the traditional family, which has endured for so long, and has been so key to the cohesion of our civilization. The “traditional family” (one man + one woman, bound exclusively) is not a natural fact; it is an achievement of civilization. As sociologist Carle Zimmerman shows in his historically-based “Family and Civilization,” the traditional family is a historical artifact that provides a unique basis for human flourishing — this, versus the “trustee family” (the clan, including polygamous ones), or the atomized family, which is the ultimate product of individualism. Zimmerman, a Harvard sociologist, doesn’t make religious arguments — indeed, one gets the idea that he is not religious at all — but rather observes the connection between ways of seeing the family and the individual, and the decline of ancient Greece and Rome. The book is too complex to get into in detail here, but this is a passage from a column I wrote about it some years back:

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family.

That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can’t explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears.

The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic “Family and Civilization,” which has just been republished in an edited version by ISI Press, is a chillingly prophetic volume that deserves a wide new audience.

In all civilizations, Zimmerman theorized, there are three basic family types. The “trustee” family is tribal and clannish, and predominates in agrarian societies. The “domestic” family model is a middle type centering on the nuclear family ensconced in fairly strong extended-family bonds; it’s found in civilizations undergoing rapid development. The final model is the “atomistic” family, which features weak bonds between and within nuclear families; it’s the type that emerges as normative in advanced civilizations.

When the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the strong trustee families of the barbarian tribes replaced the weak, atomistic Roman families as the foundation of society.

Churchmen believed a social structure that broke up the ever-feuding clans and gave the individual more freedom would be better for society’s stability and spent centuries reforming the European family toward domesticity. The natalist worldview advocated by churchmen knit tightly religious faith, family loyalty and child bearing. From the 10th century on, the domestic family model ruled Europe through its greatest cultural efflorescence. But then came the Reformation and the Enlightenment, shifting culture away from tradition and toward the individual. Thus, since the 18th century, the atomistic family has been the Western cultural norm.

Here’s the problem: Societies ruled by the atomistic family model, with its loosening of constraints on its individual members, quit having enough children to carry on. They become focused on the pleasures of the present. Eventually, these societies expire from lack of manpower, which itself is a manifestation of a lack of the will to live. ...

Why? Zimmerman was not religious, but he contended the core problem was a loss of faith. Religions that lack a strong pro-fertility component don’t survive over time, he observed; nor do cultures that don’t have a powerfully natalist religion.

Labels: Christianity, conservatism, culture, demographics, extended family, family structure, gay marriage, natalism, religion

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As the 2012 presidential election grows closer, voter demographics will grab ever more airtime. In a finely balanced electorate, switching parties is less common, making internal growth of party bases more important. Getting the vote out is one aspect of this; population change another. ...

All of which explains why pundits' interest in demography has been steadily rising. Ruy Teixeira, for instance, claims that the growth of the college-educated, secular and Hispanic proportion of the population will soon provide the Democrats with an inbuilt electoral majority. Chris Bowers of the Nation styles this the “End of Bubba Dominance.” On the other side of the ledger, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks highlights the role of fertility: “Liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result.” “In Seattle,” adds Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, “there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs.”

In order to adjudicate between these competing predictions, I teamed up with Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon, two leading Austrian-based experts in the art of projecting the size of subgroups in populations. The results, published in the journal Population Studies, show that Democrats are only marginally younger than Republicans and Republican women bear the same number of children as their Democratic sisters. Immigration, however, is an important factor. If ethnic party identification remains as it is, Latino population growth will benefit the Democrats, shifting the balance between the two parties by two and a half points in the Democrats’ favor over the next 30 years. ...

Those who doubt whether demography can shape politics should consider world Jewry. The combination of religious polarization and demographic upheaval is especially stark among Jews. They began to secularize in large numbers in the 19th century, and Orthodoxy emerged to combat this trend. The temperature of Jewish fundamentalism increased sharply after the horrors of World War II, and an ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community emerged, segregating itself from other Jews. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the largely secular Zionist leadership assumed that the black-hatted, sidelocked Haredim were a relic of history. They gave the ultra-Orthodox an exemption from the draft, subsidies to study at yeshiva, and other religious privileges to make sure their anti-Zionism didn't dissuade the Great Powers from establishing a home for the Jews in Palestine. In 1948, there were only 400 Israeli Jews with military exemptions, many of which were not used. By 2007, that number had soared to 55,000. Meanwhile, the fringe of ultra-Orthodox pupils in Israel's Jewish primary schools in 1960 has ballooned: they now comprise a third of the Jewish first grade class. They are gaining power: in Jerusalem, Haredim rioted in late December, demanding the right to segregate women on buses, and have already elected the city's first Haredi mayor. Outside Israel, work by Joshua Comenetz and Yaakov Wise reveals that the ultra-Orthodox may form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

The Jewish example shows that population change can reverse secularism and shift the center of gravity of an entire society in a conservative religious direction. Notice that change has come about because values have polarized people and increasingly determine family size.

In a more modest way, the same is true elsewhere.

Labels: Christianity, culture, demographics, Europe, immigration, Islam, Israel, Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, religion

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The world is heading for demographic catastrophe. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe for 40 years, to the point where, today, Israel is the only First World country where women have enough babies to sustain their population. The developing world is heading in the same direction, fast. Only 3 percent of the world’s population live in a country where the fertility rate is not dropping.

As fertility falls, populations shrink. As populations shrink, economies will sputter. Western countries will struggle to support too many retirees without enough workers, and the rest of the world (particularly places such as China and Russia) will be challenged just to maintain order as societies change in unprecedented ways: Most people will have neither brothers, sisters, aunts, nor uncles, and there will be no such thing as an extended family.

This forecast may sound apocalyptic, but it’s nearly conventional wisdom among the demographers and economists who study such things. However, the conventional wisdom also sees a silver lining to the world’s demographic decline: a “geriatric peace.” As fertility rates decline, and babies become relatively scarce, the average age of societies increases. In many countries the median age is already over 40, with geezers outnumbering children. And once the entire world looks like Florida, the thinking goes, we’ll all be more peaceable, because countries full of old men don’t go to war.

Unfortunately, Susan Yoshihara and Douglas A. Sylva suggest that geriatric peace may be elusive, and in Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics they have collected essays from an all-star squad of demographers, historians, and military strategists—Phillip Longman, Nicholas Eberstadt, Toshi Yoshihara, and Murray Feshbach are among their Murderers’ Row—who argue that a shrinking world may be more dangerous than we might expect.

In 1950, Japan was the fifth-most populous nation on earth, Germany was the seventh, and the United Kingdom the ninth. By 2050 these countries will rank twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second, respectively. Population is the wellspring of power, both economic and military, and the reordering of global power is, Yoshihara and Sylva argue, inherently destabilizing. ...

Yet for all the forward-looking concerns, the most bracing essay here is James R. Holmes’s examination of the demographic crises in classical Greece. In 464 b.c., a terrible earthquake shook Sparta. Much of the city was destroyed, along with some 20,000 Spartan warriors. The devastation was particularly bad from a demographic point of view because the gymnasium where young Spartiates were trained collapsed, wiping out an entire rising generation of warriors—and their potential progeny.

Labels: aging, ancient Greek city-states, China, demographics, extended family, Iran, Japan, war

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Fewer teenagers gave birth in 2010 than in any other year since 1946, government researchers announced last week, and there is good evidence that today’s teenagers are initiating sex later and using birth control more consistently than previous generations did.

According to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics, birth rates among young women ages 15 to 19 fell in all but three states and in all racial, ethnic and age groups. From 2009 to 2010, the rate of teenage births fell by 9 percent, to 34.9 per thousand, the lowest rate ever reported in the 65 years for which data is available.

“I think the current generation of youth are perhaps more conscientious and cautious,” said Dr. John Santelli, a professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia University who was not involved in writing the report.

Data from surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back up Dr. Santelli’s assertion. Since 1991, the percentage of teenagers who have ever had sex has decreased by 15 percent, the number who have had sex with four or more partners has decreased by 26 percent, and the percentage using condoms has increased by 32 percent.

Labels: abstinence, contraception, culture, demographics, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race, sex education, teenage pregnancy

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A growing number of firstborns in the USA have unmarried parents, reflecting dramatic increases since 2002 in births to cohabiting women, according to government figures out today.

The percentage of first births to women living with a male partner jumped from 12% in 2002 to 22% in 2006-10 — an 83% increase. The percentage of cohabiting new fathers rose from 18% to 25%. The analysis, by the National Center for Health Statistics, is based on data collected from 2006 to 2010.

"We were a little surprised in such a short time period to see these increases," says demographer Gladys Martinez, lead author of the report, based on face-to-face interviews with 12,279 women and 10,403 men ages 15-44.

The percentage of first births to cohabiting women tripled from 9% in 1985 to 27% for births from 2003 to 2010.

Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, who studies cohabitation and fertility, says she thinks the big jump since 2002 is likely because of the recession, which was at its height from late 2007 to 2009, right in the middle of the federal data collection.

"I think it's economic shock," she says. "Marriage is an achievement that you enter into when you're ready. But in the meantime, life happens. You form relationships. You have sex. You get pregnant. In a perfect world, they would prefer to be married, but where the economy is now, they're not going to be able to get married, and they don't want to wait to have kids."

Also, middle class parents may think more about how much kids cost, but "having kids is much more than about money. It's about love," Guzzo says. "You can be a good parent if you don't have a lot of money. You can be with someone who can be a good parent."

Sociologist Kelly Musick of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who studies cohabiting couples with children, says she's noticed women with more education starting to have children outside of marriage. She says cohabiting used to be more common among women who didn't graduate from high school but it's becoming more common for those with a high school degree or some college.

Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, demographics, economics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, race, unmarried parents

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...But that’s where the dearth of workers comes into play. Everyone agrees that rapid growth would be much nicer than higher taxes and slashed pension payments. The hitch is that over the past five years, growth in the Italian economy hasn’t averaged even 1 percent a year. Soaring growth will be tough to achieve, because more and more Italians are getting too old to work—and fewer and fewer Italians have been having the babies needed to replace them.

Italy’s fertility rate has actually been inching up from its 1995 low of 1.19 children for every woman, but it is still only about 1.4—well below the number needed to replenish its population (2.1). As a result, even with some immigration, Italy’s population growth has been very slow. It will soon stall, and eventually go into reverse. And then, one by one, the rest of Europe’s nations will follow. Not one country on the Continent has a fertility rate high enough to replace its current population. Heavy debt and a shrinking population are a very bad combination.

Since the invention of birth control and antibiotics, country after country has gone through a fairly standard shift. First, the mortality rate drops, especially among the young and the aging, and that quickly translates into a bigger workforce. Then, birthrates drop, as families realize that they no longer need to birth a basketball team to ensure that a couple members will survive to adulthood. A falling birthrate means that parents can invest more in each child; with fewer mouths to feed, more and better food can nourish each of them, and children can spend more years in school, causing worker productivity to rise from one generation to the next. As the burden of bearing and rearing children lightens, mothers can do more work outside the home, boosting both household resources and the national economy.

In 1984, when Ronald Reagan spoke of “morning in America,” he was at least demographically accurate. The youngest members of America’s vast Baby Boom were in college; the oldest were on the brink of their peak earning power. America was about to reap what the economists David Bloom and David Canning have dubbed the “demographic dividend” of rising labor supply and productivity. Bloom and Canning’s analysis of East Asia and Ireland attributes a substantial fraction of the recent economic booms in those places to this dividend.

But the dividend does not last forever. Eventually, the baby bulge reaches retirement age, the labor force stops growing, and older workers start spending their savings, depleting the nation’s supply of capital. The virtuous cycle turns vicious. This is what is happening right now in much of southern Europe.

Is strong growth still possible once the demographic dividend has been paid out? Of course it is, at least in theory. Even if the workforce isn’t expanding, strong-enough gains in worker productivity can substantially lift the economy. Longer hours and longer careers can theoretically have the same effect. But it is far from clear that in practice, these solutions will work, given the advanced age of Europe’s workers.

To see why, picture two neighboring towns, sharing all the same infrastructure and economic opportunities, with one key difference: their median age. In the first town, which I’ll call Morningburg, the average resident is 28. In the second, which I’ll call Twilight City, the average householder is 58.

Labels: aging, demographics, economics, Europe, Italy

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More than 200,000 people are divorced or separated in Ireland, it has emerged.

Census figures showed 87,770 people were divorced last April, a 150% rise since 2002, the first count after divorce was legalised in 1997.

Elsewhere, the amount of people separated stood at 116,194.

However, more Irish couples have also married in recent years, with 143,588 more people wed in 2011 than five years earlier.

Of the 1.18 million families, 143,600 were comprised of cohabiting couples. There were also 215,300 families headed by lone parents and 4,042 same-sex couples living together - 2,321 men and 1,721 women.

Labels: cohabitation, demographics, divorce, gay couples, immigration, Ireland, Marriage, single parenting

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In the future, U.S. growth will be slower. Recessions will be deeper. Recoveries will be weaker. And there's exactly one thing to blame.

That's the stark conclusion from James Stock and Mark Watson in this fascinating, and occasionally depressing, new paper. In fact, they say, the future is now. For the last few years, we've weathered the beginning of what demographers have called the grey tsunami. "Most of the slow recovery [in today's job market] is attributable to a long-term slowdown in trend employment growth," Stock and Watson write.

The authors blame two demographic demons for our uncertain future: (1) the plateau in the female labor force participation rate, and (2) the aging of the U.S. workforce. Their underlying logic is that without continued growth in female workers or a significant boost in population, employment and GDP growth will slow, leaving us vulnerable to recessions with "steeper declines and slower recoveries." In such a future, jobless recoveries will be the only recoveries we know. ...

The ascendance of women in the workforce was perhaps the singular cultural/economic triumph of the second half of the 20th century. In 1960, just four in ten working-age women were active in the labor force. By 1990, it was more like six in ten (see graph below of female participation rates). By 2010, women made up a majority of the workforce. But that growth appears to have hit a ceiling. The female participation rate in early 2011 was the same as in 1994. In that time, the male participation has fallen. That's not good news for a country that will require more workers to both grow the national pot of money and provide for an aging population transitioning out of the workplace.

Labels: aging, culture, demographics, economics, health care, men, women

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Few communities have started to think long term about how to plan and redesign services for aging Baby Boomers as they move out of the workforce and into retirement.

Even more troubling, dwindling budgets in a tight economy have pushed communities to cut spending on delivering meals to the homebound and shuttling folks who can no longer drive to grocery stores and doctor's offices.

These cuts, advocates for older Americans say, are coming when the services are needed more than ever. And those needs will grow tremendously over the next two decades.

The nation's population of those 65 and older will double between 2000 and 2030, according to the federal Administration on Aging. That adds up to one out of every five Americans — 72.1 million people.

Just eight years from now, researchers say, a quarter of all Ohio's residents in half of the state's counties will be 60 or older. Arizona and Pennsylvania project that one in four of its residents will be over the age of 60 by 2020.

Labels: aging, culture, demographics

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When you look at pictures from the Arab spring, you see these gigantic crowds of young men, and it confirms the impression that the Muslim Middle East has a gigantic youth bulge — hundreds of millions of young people with little to do. But that view is becoming obsolete. As Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah of the American Enterprise Institute point out [pdf], over the past three decades, the Arab world has undergone a little noticed demographic implosion. Arab adults are having many fewer kids.

Usually, high religious observance and low income go along with high birthrates. But, according to the United States Census Bureau, Iran now has a similar birth rate to New England — which is the least fertile region in the U.S. [pdf]

The speed of the change is breathtaking. A woman in Oman today has 5.6 fewer babies than a woman in Oman 30 years ago. Morocco, Syria and Saudi Arabia have seen fertility-rate declines of nearly 60 percent, and in Iran it’s more than 70 percent. These are among the fastest declines in recorded history. ...

Already, nearly half the world’s population lives in countries with birthrates below the replacement level. According to the Census Bureau, the total increase in global manpower between 2010 and 2030 will be just half the increase we experienced in the two decades that just ended. At the same time, according to work by the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, the growth in educational attainment around the world is slowing.

This leads to what the writer Philip Longman has called the gray tsunami — a situation in which huge shares of the population are over 60 and small shares are under 30.

Labels: demographics, immigration, India, Iran, Japan, Middle East, Russia

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My wife and I have twins, a boy and a girl, born with much assistance from reproductive technology. As a byproduct we also have, at a clinic in New York City, two fertilized eggs ready for implantation should a willing womb—ours, or a stranger's—present itself. The zygotes cost $1,200 a year to store. That’s a lot for a few square millimeters of real estate, but then again we’re talking Manhattan. We've given ourselves a year to determine the right thing to do with those zygotes. They are our puzzle to solve.

Why Have Children?, by Christine Overall, a philosophy professor at Queen's University in Ontario, is about puzzles like these—not the specifics of reproductive technology, twins, or IVF, but about the moral questions that arise when one decides to have children, or more children.

Must you? No, Overall says.

Should you? "Don't miss it," she says.

How many? One per adult.

To arrive there Overall (herself the mother of two children, Devon and Narnia) piles her readers into the bioethical tour bus for a journey into the realm of thought experiments. ...

In short, my wife’s reality, her fundamental ontology, has shifted. I’m not fully sure how, but she is not quite the person she was before she became pregnant. I rearrange my life around the babies, but my wife has rearranged herself. She is a different person. An ethics of procreation should consider that difference, right?

Overall would say so and is a bit wearied—respectful but wearied—of systems that neglect these facts. She singles out the ideas of Parfit and Savulescu: These men, she writes, are often "oblivious to the fact that it is women ... who become pregnant and bear children and that it is their lives that are made better or in some cases unutterably worse by the conditions and circumstances in which they procreate." If your model of reality doesn’t take the female body into account then it’s a flawed model; forget the women and risk introducing "errors into moral reasoning."

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, children, culture, demographics, family size, Fathers, motherhood, women

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So these two sociologists go into a bar and the man says to the woman, “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been studying what I call ‘accordion families,’ ” she says. “Right now something like three and a half million American parents are sharing a house with adult kids who’ve either come back home or never left.”

“You want to talk about trends?” the man counters. “Did you know that aside from childless couples the most common household type in America is an adult living alone? That’s one out of seven adults, over 30 million people.”

Wishing to avoid an argument, the sociologists appeal to the bartender. Which trend seems more significant to him? “Beats me,” he says, “but I liked this place a lot better when the customers were political economists.”

It’s not funny, I know, but it’s not the punch line, either. That comes when the two sociologists I have in mind — ­Katherine S. Newman of Johns Hopkins University, the author of “The Accordion Family,” and Eric Klinenberg of New York University, the author of “Going Solo” — conclude their fascinating studies with a nod each to the bartender. Except by then they’re no longer in a bar; they’re in Sweden. We’ll get to that.

First let’s look at those so-called accordion families, which Newman evaluates both as a transnational phenomenon and in the nuanced particulars of individual households. Like Klinenberg, she devotes a good portion of her book to personal interviews, but where Klinenberg goes deep in his emphasis on the United States, Newman goes wide. At the extreme end of her analysis is a country like Italy, where 37 percent of 30-year-old men live with their parents, and have never lived anywhere else. Less striking but certainly notable is a parallel trend in the United States, where a higher proportion of adult children now live with parents than at any time since the 1950s.

Newman states her thesis plainly: “Global competition is the most profound structural force affecting the residential location of young adults in the developed world (or the under­developed world, for that matter)” — but one is impressed by her refusal to turn thesis into dogma. She acknowledges that different cultures define adulthood in different ways, with Americans tending to see it as “a process of self-discovery” and Europeans as “a station defined by the way one relates to others.” She also appreciates the mutual benefits of multi­generational households, as suggested by a survey showing that 76 percent of American parents of 21-year-olds say they feel close to their child, as opposed to a mere quarter of their own parents saying the same.

Still, Newman does not shy away from the larger effects of a child’s “failure to launch,” independently, into the world. Not the least of these is a generation’s failure to generate. At present there are four workers in Europe for every pensioner; by 2050 there will be only two workers for every retiree. Birthrates in the United States would also be falling if not for Mexican immigrants — yet another job they’ve taken on, along with those of lawn- and elder-care and favored scapegoat. But in Japan, the fastest-aging country in the world, where only 1 percent of the population is foreign-born, the future looks more bleak.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", aging, class, culture, demographics, economics, Europe, extended family, family structure, motherhood, work/family policy

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The number of single Jewish women opting to become mothers has increased dramatically over the past decade, according to statistics released on Tuesday by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

The data, which were published to coincide with Family Day celebrated nationwide on Thursday, shows that some 4,900 single Jewish women in Israel gave birth in 2010, nearly double the 2,600 single women who gave birth in 2000. The increase can be linked to advances in medical technology and the country’s policy of making fertility treatment widely available and free.

The number of mothers raising children without any partner has doubled from 8,000 women in 2000 to more than 16,000 women in 2010. ...

Ninety-one percent of single parent families with young children are headed by a woman: 57% are single mothers because of divorce, 16% are women who chose to give birth without a partner, 15% are separated from their spouse and the rest are widows.

The traditional family structure is still very much the norm – 96% of couples are officially married, while the remaining 4% are couples who have chosen to share their lives without traditional approval.

Labels: demographics, divorce, Israel, Judaism, Marriage, Middle East, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting

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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia's falling population poses a dire threat to the country's existence, which he will reverse with sweeping new social policies if he's elected to a third presidential term in polls that are now less than three weeks off.

In the fourth in a series of wordy programmatic articles aimed at spelling out what he would do with a fresh six-year Kremlin term, Mr. Putin said Monday that Russia's long-standing demographic crisis, which features low birth rates coupled with unusually high working-age male mortality, could eventually turn the huge country into "a geopolitical 'void' whose fate would be decided by other powers" unless current trends are turned around.

Among the measures he proposes are a fresh assault on Russia's catastrophic rates of male alcoholism, special allowances for women who have more than two children (an idea that's been tried before with limited success), improved housing and educational prospects for all Russians, and a "smart" immigration policy that will entice Russians living abroad to return to the motherland and attract educated and talented young foreigners.

When he first came to power 12 years ago, Putin inherited a catastrophic population crisis. The number of Russians was shrinking by 0.5 percent each year and the prospect of a national breakdown was widely discussed by social scientists. But a decade of relative political stability, higher living standards, and public health campaigns have boosted male life expectancy from a 2003 low of 58 years to 63 today, and raised fertility rates from about 1.2 children-per-woman in 2002 to 1.6 in 2011 (still short of the 2.1 level experts say is needed to sustain a population), according to the state statistics service Rosstat.

Nevertheless, Putin writes, "if existing trends continue," Russia's present population of about 143 million will plunge to about 107 million people by 2050 – a disaster for a country that occupies such a vast territory and contains around 40 percent of the world's natural resources and an extraordinary population loss in peacetime. ...

"Putin counts on lowering the mortality rate by reducing alcohol consumption and drug abuse and getting people to go in more for sports. These are realistic measures," says Boris Denisov, a demographer at Moscow State University. "But the authorities' wish to raise the birth rate is based on the idea that women and families want more children, but lack enough money and other resources to do so. So, the reasoning goes, if they are given apartments and more money, they will have more babies. There is no evidence to support this idea. Many countries in the world have higher living standards than Russia but the same or even lower fertility rates."

Labels: demographics, natalism, Russia

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...Many people, (including our editor) are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn't just ditch this requirement. They note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it divisive, or "out-dated." C'mon! It's the 21st century, they say! Don't they SEE that it's STUPID, they scream.

Here's the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what's going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today.

Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae. He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

General lowering of moral standards
A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
Government coercion in reproductive matters.

Does that sound familiar?

Because it sure sounds like what's been happening for the past 40 years.

As George Akerloff wrote in Slate over a decade ago,

By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.

Labels: Catholic Church, cohabitation, contraception, demographics, Fathers, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, population control, premarital sex

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A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found.

The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had "no interest" in or even "despised" sex. That's almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

If that's not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

The survey paints a bleak picture for Japan's aging population. The Associated Press reports that the national population of 128 million will have shrunk by one-third by 2060 and seniors will account for 40 percent of people, placing a greater burden on the work force population to support the country's social security and tax systems.

Labels: demographics, gender, heterosexual couples, Japan, men, sex, women

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...Baby boomers will live longer and in greater numbers than ever seen before with few youngsters to support them financially and physically. According to page 10 of The Coming Generational Storm, Kotlikoff and Burns, compute that “by 2030, the senior to kid ratio will be 3 to 1!”

What will ensure that the Baby Boomers have space and time to age gracefully? Who will take up that mantle? That our current healthcare system is less than adequate to support the needs and expectations of the “silver tsunami” of the Baby Boomers is far from new. Volumes have been and continue to be written on how Medicare and the long-term care system need massive overhaul, and so I won’t enter that minefield. My mind goes to the home. I think of how as the boomers begin to age, they will need “informal” or “family” caregivers by the thousands. “Informal caregiving” can be defined as “unpaid care given voluntarily to ill or disabled persons by their family and friends.” (For a good primer on informal caregiving, see the 1998 study on informal caregiving [pdf] conducted by the US Department of Health and Human Services) Informal caregivers assist a parent, friend or neighbor with completing normal activities of daily living ranging from driving, grocery shopping, taking medication, managing money, to even more personally vulnerable activities like bathing, dressing, using the toilet, or eating.

In past generations, a less debilitated spouse would tend to be on the front lines of caregiving, but there are a shockingly high number of single boomers. According to the same survey of the McKinsey Global Institute, by 2015, 46% of all boomers aged 65 and above will be unmarried, creating 21 million unmarried households. For the same age group in 1985, there were only 10 million unmarried households. In an age marked by high rates of divorce, either the role of an ex-spouse will change or an adult child will be forced to move forward in line to act as the primary caregiver and decision maker for an aging parent. Considering that already the most common form of informal caregiving relationship is that of an adult child assisting an elderly parent, the increased caregiving burden on Gen X and Millenials of the future will demand creative work, family, financial, and practical solutions that just don’t exist yet.

According to the AARP, most informal caregivers provide an average of 21 hours of care per week, so basically a part-time job. They paint a picture of informal caregiving where caregivers assume responsibility for their loved one’s day to day care, triage any health care crises, absorb financial burdens big and small, and tend to underestimate how much time and how stressful being a caregiver will truly be.

Labels: aging, children, culture, demographics, health care, Marriage, parenting, unmarried parents

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