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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It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife. ...

A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

Labels: Asia, children, demographics, economics, girls, South Asia, women

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Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls. ...

Social Implications
The consequences of medically abetted mass feticide are far-reaching and manifestly adverse. In populations with unnaturally skewed SRBs, the very fact that many thousands — or in some cases, millions — of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colors the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavored sex in nakedly utilitarian terms, and indeed signaling that their very existence is now conditional and contingent.

Moreover, enduring and extreme SRB imbalances set the demographic stage for an incipient “marriage squeeze” in affected populations, with notably reduced pools of potential future brides. China’s persistently elevated SRBs, for example, stand to transform it from a country where as of 2000 nearly all males (about 96 percent) had been married by their early 40s to one in which nearly a quarter (23 percent) are projected to be never married as of 2040, less than 30 years from now, according to a 2008 analysis by the demographer Zeng Yi and colleagues in the journal Genus. Such a transformation augurs ill in a number of respects. For one thing, unmarried men appear to suffer greater health risks than their married counterparts, even after controlling for exogenous social and environmental factors; a sharp increase in the proportion of essentially unmarriageable males in a society with a universal marriage norm may only accentuate those health risks. In a low-income society lacking sturdy and reliable national pension guarantees for the elderly, a steep rise in the proportion of unmarried and involuntarily childless men begs the question of old-age support for that rising cohort. Economists such as Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner have hypothesized that mass feticide, in making women scarce, will only increase their “value” — but in settings where the legal and personal rights of the individual are not secure and inviolable, the “rising value of women” can have perverse and unexpected consequences, including increased demand for prostitution and an upsurge in the kidnapping and trafficking of women (as is now being witnessed in some women-scarce areas in Asia, as reported by Mara Hvistendahl in her new book Unnatural Selection).

Finally, there is the speculative question of the social impact of a sudden addition of a large cohort of young “excess males” to populations with sustained extreme SRBs: depending on a given country’s cultural and institutional capabilities for coping with this challenge, such trends could quite conceivably lead to increased crime, violence, and social tensions — or possibly even a greater proclivity for social instability. (For a decidedly pessimistic but studied assessment of these prospects, see Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer’s 2004 book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population.)

All in all, mass sex selection can be regarded as a “tragedy of the commons” dynamic, in which the aggregation of individual (parental) choices has the inadvertent result of degrading the quality of life for all — and some much more than others. ...

Considerations for the Future
There is, however, one country thus far that has managed to return from grotesquely imbalanced SRBs to normal human ratios: South Korea. As explained by Woojin Chung and Monica Das Gupta in 2007 in Population and Development Review, there is still considerable dispute about the factors involved in this turnaround, with many institutions and actors ready to take credit (as the old saying goes: success has many fathers). Available evidence, however, seems to suggest that South Korea’s SRB reversal was influenced less by government policy than by civil society: more specifically, by the spontaneous and largely uncoordinated congealing of a mass movement for honoring, protecting, and prizing daughters. In effect, this movement — drawing largely but by no means exclusively on the faith-based community — sparked a national conversation of conscience about the practice of female feticide. This conversation was instrumental in stigmatizing the practice, not altogether unlike the way in which nationwide conversations of conscience helped to stigmatize international slave-trading in other countries in earlier times. The best hope today in the global war against baby girls may be to carry this conversation of conscience to other lands. Medical and health care professionals — without whose assistance mass female feticide could not occur — have a special obligation to be front and center in this dialogue.

Labels: abortion, Asia, China, demographics, gender, girls, Hong Kong, India, population control, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam

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Labels: culture, demographics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births

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A fresh government poster went up the other day on the alley wall not far from our front door in Beijing. I barely paused at the cheery patriotic exhortations across the flag—Is that a sign I’ve been here a while?—and my eye fell instead on a curious thing about the family: it has two kids.

I first noticed that two-kid families had begun popping up in advertisements for KFC and General Electric a little over a year ago, but political advertising is something else entirely. The Party has held much of China to a one-child-per-family policy for thirty years, and, by and large, it still does. Some parts of the program are comically antique: a Beijing mother reminded me today that families with one child in the capital are still automatically eligible to receive a monthly “reward” from the state for adhering to the one-child plan. The amount hasn’t changed since it was set in 1979: five yuan a month, about seventy-nine cents. (It doesn’t go as far as it once did, now that China is the world’s largest consumer of Rolls Royces.)

But the Party propagandists may be on to something. Two-child families may not be so far over the horizon after all, because of a growing consensus that economic pressures demand a change.

Labels: aging, children, China, demographics, economics, one-child policy, population control

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In a less than promising finding for a country with longtime population woes, Armenia is running short on females, and the rampant practice of selective abortions is to blame, the United Nations Population Fund has announced.

Selective birth control, a practice sometimes termed gendricide, is widespread in the South Caucasus for a mix of economic and cultural reasons. Armenia is believed to have the region’s highest rate of female foeticide. The gender ratio at birth is as high as 120 boys to 110 girls, 20 percent above the accepted norm, according to UNFPA's Armenia office. The ratio is lower, but also skewed in neighboring Azerbaijan and Georgia. ...

The Global Gender Gap report put Armenia in second place after China in terms of the most distorted gender ratios. Azerbaijan and Georgia came only three countries away from Armenia on that list.

Labels: abortion, Armenia, demographics, gender, gender gap, sex selection

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MOSCOW — From morning all through the night, tens of thousands of Russians have been lining up since Saturday in the cold with just one aim: to kiss a glass-covered reliquary that they believe holds the Virgin Mary’s belt.

They shuffle along, waiting for up to 12 hours without complaint in a line that stretches for miles. Within a few days, the organizers say, the wait could reach 24 hours. At any given time there are about 25,000 people, according to news media estimates, and as of Wednesday morning, 285,000 true believers had earned their moment before the belt, said the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation, which organized the tour.

As befits his status as the arbiter of most things Russian, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin was the first to greet the holy relic when it arrived on Oct. 20 in St. Petersburg from a Greek Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos in Greece for a monthlong tour of Russia.

Of all the industrial nations, perhaps only Russia outdistances the United States in the religiosity of its people, two million of whom venerated the belt before its final stop in Moscow. ...

Moscow’s mayor, Sergei S. Sobyanin, came to inspect the scene. The benefactor of the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation is Vladimir Yakunin, president of the Russian Railroads, who is close to Mr. Putin. At a news conference in October, Mr. Yakunin said the belt — usually kept at the Vatopedi Monastery on the Mount Athos peninsula in northern Greece, where women are not permitted — was known for promoting fertility.

“The belt of the Most Holy Virgin Mary possesses miraculous power,“ he said. “It helps women and helps in childbirth. In our demographic situation, this is in and of itself important."

Labels: children, demographics, Orthodox Christianity, religion, Russia

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HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- The trouble for Henry Liem begins every time he prepares to return to his homeland.

Getting the required visa from the Vietnamese government is a breeze. It's the "second visa" -- from his wife worried that he will stray over there -- that requires diplomatic skills.

"My wife is always cranky every time I go," said Liem, a philosophy instructor at San Jose City College who visits Vietnam twice a year to teach at a university. "So I rarely disclose my upcoming trip until the last minute. It's pain minimization. The longer she knows, the longer I have to bear the pain."

Thirty-six years after the Vietnam War ended, Communist government officials openly welcome Vietnamese-Americans back, even those who fought against them. But another Civil War has erupted, this one pitting Vietnamese-American women against their husbands and boyfriends who want to return to the Southeast Asian country. The men's significant others contend that Vietnamese women lie in wait to ambush them, often eager for the financial stability such a match would bring.

"All the girls in Vietnam are aggressive. They attack!" said Ha Tien, 38, who owns an accounting business in San Jose. She said she lost her man to such a love guerrilla a few years ago. ...

Vietnam is a demographically youthful society -- about 70 percent of the country's 90 million citizens are younger than 35 -- and young people flow into the big cities from the countryside every day looking for opportunities. Viet Kieu, the term for ethnic Vietnamese living overseas, and foreigners are seen as ideal catches for some women because they can support them and their families.

Labels: culture, demographics, economics, immigration, Marriage, Vietnam

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Last week, when reviewing some of the family talk on the campaign trail, I mentioned a new study co-authored by Brad Wilcox called The Sustainable Demographic Dividend. As many National Review Online readers know, W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is also the president of Demographic Intelligence, the premier provider of U.S. fertility forecasts and fertility analytics for companies in the financial-services, food, household-products, insurance, juvenile-products, medical, and retail sectors. He talks to National Review Online about what exactly fertility and marriage have to do with the economy. –KJL

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is a demographic dividend? Why is it important to the economy?

W. BRADFORD WILCOX: Traditionally, a “demographic dividend” has been defined as the economic advantage that countries transitioning from a high-fertility regime to a low-fertility regime gain when the children that were born during the high-fertility years have entered their prime working years (15–64) but are not having many kids of their own. This allows countries to focus their human and financial capital on education and the market economy, rather than raising children, and — assuming policy conditions are right — enjoy a spurt of economic growth.

Economist David Bloom argues that more than 25 percent of the per capita GDP growth associated with the East Asian economic miracle of the late 20th century can be laid at the feet of the dramatic demographic changes that swept over East Asia in the last half century, when the total fertility rate fell from about six children per woman in 1950 to well below two today in most East Asian countries. These demographic changes freed up time, energy, attention, and capital on the part of men and, especially, women that could be focused on the economy.

In the short term, this demographic dividend can work out brilliantly, as the East Asian miracle attests. But in the long term, this dividend can turn into a demographic liability as birth rates fall well below replacement and a society ceases to produce enough people to work in the economy and pay for the welfare state. This is what is now happening in Japan, and a similar fate may befall other leading economies in the region — from Taiwan to South Korea.

In fact, just last month, a leading South Korean think tank predicted that the South Korean economy could face a major downturn within the next decade, because the country’s workforce is now poised to shrink as a consequence of long-term low fertility in the country. The bottom line: In the short term, low fertility can bring increased economic productivity and growth, but in the long term, low fertility may undercut growth if population trends prove unsustainable to the economy and the welfare state.

Labels: Asia, children, culture, demographics, economics, family policy, Marriage, men, parenting, W. Bradford Wilcox, work/family policy

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What then are the appropriate policy responses to the unsustainable state of family life in many advanced societies? Here are ten proposals that might be helpful:

1. PROMOTE FAMILY ENTERPRISE.
The last generation has seen a rapid increase in corporate consolidation. Whereas rigorous enforcement of antitrust and other policies preserved an important role for small-scale family farms and businesses until the 1980s, today there is almost no check on the growth of giant retailers, agribusinesses, and industrial concerns. As British social theorist Philip Blond has written, “Our fishmongers, butchers, and bakers are driven out—converting a whole class of owner occupiers into low wage earners, employed by supermarkets.” Though it is not possible, or even desirable, to entirely reverse these trends toward monopolization, it is possible to moderate them and thereby carve out more space for family enterprise and entrepreneurship, which will in turn help to rebuild the economic foundation of the family. A good start would be to offer payroll tax breaks to small businesses and to more rigorously enforce existing antitrust laws.

2. INCREASE INCOME SECURITY FOR YOUNG COUPLES.
Young couples contemplating starting a family now face far greater risk than their parents typically did that they will face repeated spells of un- and underemployment. As political scientist Jacob Hacker has demonstrated, even before the Great Recession of 2008, the size of swings in pretax family income from year to year had doubled in the United States since the early 1970s. In Europe, many young adults typically find themselves maneuvering from contract to contract, rather than being able to settle into a secure career that will support a family. In the developing world, young adults often find themselves trying to get ahead amid the swirl of hypercompetitive megacities that seem to have literally no room for children.

There is no single policy lever to pull that will put the family back into a healthy and sustainable balance with global market forces. We must grapple with issues like foreign trade, offshore employment, and downsizing. Yet it is essential that measures of efficiency not be so narrowly defined that they discount the vital role that secure, functioning families play in sustaining economic progress. To soften the blows young adults face from income and employment instability associated with globalization, countries should ensure access to affordable health care and lifetime learning to keep job skills from becoming obsolete. ...

8. ADJUST THE FINANCING OF THE WELFARE STATE TO MEET THE NEEDS OF AN AGING SOCIETY.
All pension and health-care benefits, including those conveyed through the private sector, are ultimately financed by babies and those who raise and educate them. Yet in modern societies, the “nurturing sector” of the economy is starved for resources. Parents in particular rarely receive any material compensation for the sacrifices they make on behalf of their children.

Here is a suggestive policy idea for allowing the nurturing sector to keep a greater share of the value it creates for society: Say to the next generation of young adults, have one child, and your payroll taxes, which support the elderly, will drop by one-third. A second child would be worth a two-thirds reduction in payroll taxes. Have three or more children, and pay no payroll taxes until your youngest child turns 18. When it comes time to retire, your benefits (and your spouse’s) will be calculated just as if you had both been contributing the maximum tax during the period in which you were raising children, provided that all your children have graduated from high school.

Labels: children, culture, demographics, economics, family policy, government interest in marriage, Marriage, parenting, poverty, religion, tax policy, universities, work/family policy

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The National Marriage Project, joined by universities in five nations, has published The Sustainable Demographic Dividend--a report that links the strength of families and the economy.

“A turning point has occurred in the life of the human race,” the report found. “The sustainability of humankind’s oldest institution, the family—the fount of fertility, nurturance, and human capital—is now an open question. On current trends, we face a world of rapidly aging and declining populations, of few children—many of them without the benefit of siblings and a stable, two-parent home—of lonely seniors living on meager public support, of cultural and economic stagnation.”

Labels: aging, children, demographics

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4,316,233.

That's how many babies were born in the United States in 2007, the highest number ever.

But after that, the number dropped. Last year, just over 4 million boys and girls were born in the 50 states.

The likely reason? The economy, of course.

A decline in fertility rates that began in 2008 is closely linked to financial woes that started at the same time, said a new Pew Research Center report issued Wednesday. Changes in personal income, per capita GDP, unemployment rates and claims, and state-level foreclosure rates all had an effect.

In 2007, there were 69.7 babies per 1,000 women of childbearing age. Provisional data for 2010 showed that number had dropped to 64.7.

The actual number of births from 2008 to 2009 rose only in one state, North Dakota, which also posted one of the nation's lowest unemployment rates at 3.1%.

Labels: children, demographics, economics, race

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Marriage, quite literally, is the lifeblood of the economy, according to a new report released Monday by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. The report, "The Sustainable Demographic Dividend," examined demographic data, such as census records and consumer expenditure surveys, and concluded that economic growth is dependent on healthy marriages.

The University of Virginia researchers found that when people get married and have children, seven sectors of the economy experience tenable growth. The specific sectors are: child care, life and personal insurance, household products and services, health care, food, home maintenance/home services, and pets and toys. By contrast, those industries suffer when marriage and fertility rates are low.

Since the recession hit, marriage and fertility rates have been waning. In 2009, the number of babies born in the U.S. dropped by 2.3 percent. Young Americans want to get married and have kids, says Brad Wilcox, lead researcher on the report, most just can't afford to do it given current unemployment, and underemployment, rates. ...

You seem to go back and forth in the report on the impact of women’s work outside the home on fertility; you suggest that it can both increase and decrease fertility. What’s your conclusion?

Historically, there was a very real tension between work and fertility for women. And that’s still the case; in most modern economies, women who do not work full-time in the labor force tend to have more kids. It’s also the case that the developed countries that have the highest fertility rates are ones where they give women more flexibility to combine work and family. I’m thinking here of places like Sweden. In the United States there aren’t a lot of public policies that help women to combine work and family but what’s exceptional about the U.S. economy is that it’s a lot more flexible when it comes to women moving into and moving out of the work force, as compared to many European countries where it’s hard both to move in and to move out of a job easily and quickly … For both of those different reasons, Sweden and the U.S. have comparatively high levels of fertility as compared to countries like Germany, Spain and Japan that haven’t had as strong a tradition of creating a flexible work-family culture for their women … The takeaway here is that from both the corporate end of things and the public policy end of things, we should pursue policies that allow families, including obviously women and especially mothers, to make the best choice for them and their family, and not to have a one-size-fits-all policy that would either favor stay-at-home parents on the one hand and households with both kinds of work on the other hand. ...

What can be done to encourage more stable marriages?

At the corporate level, companies do have a lot of power when it comes to shaping their internal culture; creating a culture that’s friendly to families, that makes it as easy as possible for people to work around their family schedules. Are they, for instance, offering their employees family plans that may be helpful to them as a couple and as a family, and make them better employees as well? They have even more influence when it comes to advertising. To go back to P&G again, it’s one of the biggest advertisers in the United States; are they thinking intentionally about how the message that’s embedded in their advertising does or does not encourage a family-friendly ethos?

On the public policy side of things, I would endorse things like efforts to increase the child tax credit, and keeping it fully refundable, which would put more money in the pockets of working-class and poor families. It would help to fill out, to some degree, the economic foundations of family life in many working-class and poor communities. But also it would be helpful to middle-class families. This idea of increasing the child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000, and limiting that to kids who are in the household, would not be discriminatory but I think it would make family life more economical and it’s a concrete idea.

We could [also] do a lot better job in this country of improving our vocational educational system to bring it up to par with a country like Germany. That might seem kind of far afield, but the point is that I think one of the reasons we’re seeing marriages fail to form in the first place, and break down in the second place, is that many working-class and poor Americans don’t have the skills and training that they need to get a decent-paying job, and that has implications for their capacity to get and stay married.

Labels: cohabitation, corporate responsibility, culture, demographics, economics, education, government interest in marriage, Marriage, tax policy, W. Bradford Wilcox, work/family policy

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...Until quite recently, such population growth always came primarily from increases in the numbers of young people. Between 1950 and 1990, for example, increases in the number of people under 30 accounted for more than half of the growth of the world's population, while only 12 percent came from increases in the ranks of those over 60.

But in the future it will be the exact opposite. The U.N. now projects that over the next 40 years, more than half (58 percent) of the world's population growth will come from increases in the number of people over 60, while only 6 percent will come from people under 30. Indeed, the U.N. projects that by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will be falling globally -- and that's even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developing world. A gray tsunami will be sweeping the planet.

Which countries will be aging most rapidly in 2025? They won't be in Europe, where birth rates fell comparatively gradually and now show some signs of ticking up. Instead, they'll be places like Iran and Mexico, which experienced youth bulges that were followed quickly by a collapse in birth rates. In just 35 years, both Iran and Mexico will have a larger percentage of their populations over 60 than France does today. Other places with birth rates now below replacement levels include not just old Europe but also developing countries such as Brazil, Chile, China, Lebanon, Tunisia, South Korea, and Vietnam.

Because of the phenomenon of hyper-aging in the developing world, another great variable is already changing as well: migration. In Mexico, for example, the population of children age 4 and under was 434,000 less in 2010 than it was in 1996. The result? The demographic momentum that fueled huge flows of Mexican migration to the United States has waned, and will wane much more in the future. ...

Another related megatrend is the rapid change in the size, structure, and nature of the family. In many countries, such as Germany, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, the one-child family is now becoming the norm. This trend creates a society in which not only do most people have no siblings, but also no aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, or nephews. Many will lack children of their own as well. Today about one in five people in advanced Western countries, including the United States, remains childless. Huge portions of the world's population will thus have no biological relatives except their parents.

Labels: aging, demographics, family size, family structure, Marriage, religion, siblings

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How long do countries have until their populations disappear?

As The Economist reports this week, many women in the richer parts of Asia have gone on “marriage strike”, preferring the single life to the marital yoke. That is one reason why their fertility rates have fallen. And they are not alone. In 83 countries and territories around the world, according to the United Nations, women will not have enough daughters to replace themselves, unless fertility rates rise. In Hong Kong, for example, a cohort of 1,000 women would be expected to give birth to just 547 daughters, at today’s fertility rates. (That gives Hong Kong a “net reproduction rate” of just 0.547, in the language of demographers.) If nothing changed, those 547 daughters would be succeeded by just 299 daughters of their own, and so on.

Labels: demographics

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TWENTY years ago a debate erupted about whether there were specific “Asian values”. Most attention focused on dubious claims by autocrats that democracy was not among them. But a more intriguing, if less noticed, argument was that traditional family values were stronger in Asia than in America and Europe, and that this partly accounted for Asia’s economic success. In the words of Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore and a keen advocate of Asian values, the Chinese family encouraged “scholarship and hard work and thrift and deferment of present enjoyment for future gain”.

On the face of it his claim appears persuasive still. In most of Asia, marriage is widespread and illegitimacy almost unknown. In contrast, half of marriages in some Western countries end in divorce, and half of all children are born outside wedlock. The recent riots across Britain, whose origins many believe lie in an absence of either parental guidance or filial respect, seem to underline a profound difference between East and West.

Yet marriage is changing fast in East, South-East and South Asia, even though each region has different traditions. The changes are different from those that took place in the West in the second half of the 20th century. Divorce, though rising in some countries, remains comparatively rare. What’s happening in Asia is a flight from marriage (see article).

Marriage rates are falling partly because people are postponing getting hitched. Marriage ages have risen all over the world, but the increase is particularly marked in Asia. People there now marry even later than they do in the West. The mean age of marriage in the richest places—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—has risen sharply in the past few decades, to reach 29-30 for women and 31-33 for men.

A lot of Asians are not marrying later. They are not marrying at all. Almost a third of Japanese women in their early 30s are unmarried; probably half of those will always be. Over one-fifth of Taiwanese women in their late 30s are single; most will never marry. In some places, rates of non-marriage are especially striking: in Bangkok, 20% of 40-44-year old women are not married; in Tokyo, 21%; among university graduates of that age in Singapore, 27%. So far, the trend has not affected Asia’s two giants, China and India. But it is likely to, as the economic factors that have driven it elsewhere in Asia sweep through those two countries as well; and its consequences will be exacerbated by the sex-selective abortion practised for a generation there. By 2050, there will be 60m more men of marriageable age than women in China and India.

Labels: Asia, demographics, divorce, economics, gender, Marriage, men, women

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SAGONJEVO, Serbia (AP) — Not in her wildest dreams did Edmonda ever imagine she'd marry a guy like Zoran, have his baby and live in his country.

She's an Albanian Muslim, he's an Orthodox Christian Serb — and their people have been mired in a web of ethnic and religious hatred over Kosovo's bloody war for independence.

But Edmonda Kardaku did wed Zoran Tomic, joining hundreds of compatriots, mostly Muslims or Roman Catholics, who have broken deep taboos by marrying men from rural Serbia, where women have been fleeing to the cities or abroad and causing an alarming population decline. ...

Their love story stands in contrast to another couple in the same village, where the Serb is much older than his Albanian wife.

Zoran said the man does not allow the woman to communicate with the rest of the villagers, not even with Edmonda.

"He's old, so probably he fears he's going to lose her," Tomic said.

The flurry of Serbian-Albanian marriages started in 2008 when a group of elderly men from southern Serbia formed a group called "the Old Raska bachelors," after their region which includes the village of Sagonjevo.

Both Serbia and Albania — like most of the Balkan nations — are faced with a massive exodus of young people from rural areas in search of a better life, turning many small settlements into ghost villages. The ethnic wars in the Balkans in the 1990s accelerated the problem.

In Serbia, it's mostly women who are fleeing poverty and stagnation. But in Albania, it's the men who are relocating, says Momir Kovacevic, an Old Raska activist, explaining why this interethnic marriage arrangement works. ...

The average age in Serbia is 41 years and about 20 percent of people in this country of 7 million are over 65. In 370 villages not a single child was born in the past decade. With one of Europe's lowest birthrates, the population has been declining by an average of 55,000 people a year.

Labels: Catholic Church, demographics, Eastern Europe, Islam, Marriage, Orthodox Christianity, religion

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The New York Post had a long story on fertility rates yesterday, centered on the idea that lots of college educated women—and particularly Manhattan women—no longer want to have kids. ...

The problem with that number is it means 47.1 percent of all women between the ages of 15 and 44 are childless. This universe includes tons of teenagers and women in their early 20s who just haven’t gotten around to having kids yet. As a predictor of eventual childless-ness, this number is meaningless.

What Notkin really wants is the period childless number—that is, the percentage of women who would be childless at the end of their reproductive years if all of the current fertility averages held. Or better yet, she’d like the percent of the childless cohort, which would be something like this: “among women born between 1964 and 1969, X percent were childless after the age of 44.”

When you pull those numbers out, you get a very different picture. Among women currently aged 40 to 44, only 18.8 percent are childless. As a percentage, that’s about the same as the number of women that age who have three children (19.1 percent).

Labels: childfree, children, culture, demographics, motherhood

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President Dmitri A. Medvedev has signed into law the first steps intended to restrict abortion since the collapse of communism, the latest salvo in what is beginning to resemble the fierce divide over abortion in the United States.

The changes require abortion providers to devote 10 percent of any advertising to describing the dangers of abortion to a woman’s health, and they make it illegal to describe abortion as a safe medical procedure.

Tighter restrictions on abortion may follow after Parliament considers a separate health bill in the autumn. ...

Mr. Medvedev has made the fight against Russia’s falling birthrate and plunging population, now at just under 143 million, a feature of his presidency, offering incentives like payouts for a third child and land plots to encourage women to give birth.

Official statistics placed the number of abortions at 1.3 million in 2009, a significant drop from the 1990s. Russia’s increasingly vocal anti-abortion activists, some in Parliament, say it is perhaps many times higher, and Mr. Medvedev’s wife, Svetlana Medvedeva, has taken up the cause. ...

The campaign was tied into the “Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness,” a holiday created by Mrs. Medvedeva and the Russian Orthodox Church and centered around Pyotr and Fevronia, a couple who ruled the Murom region northeast of Moscow in the late 12th century and were later declared saints. The president and his wife went to Murom to extol family values and encourage childbirth.

Meanwhile, Valery Draganov, a member of Parliament from United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party, reintroduced a legislative package for consideration in the lower house that would place strict limits on abortion.

Labels: abortion, demographics, natalism, Orthodox Christianity, Russia

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