Title : The Disappearing West
link : The Disappearing West
The Disappearing West
The “birth dearth” in the First World nations isn’t exactly news. Virtually every industrialized nation has felt it to some degree. Europe’s insane policy of importing Middle Eastern Muslims is one of the responses to it. Mark Steyn wrote about it most tellingly in his book America Alone. He forecast a grim future from our demographic drought: a world in which freedom, capitalism, minority rights, and many other good things have been eliminated from every land but our own...assuming we can hold onto them here.
But there’s no solution in prospect. The fertility rates of First World nations continue to languish below the nominal replacement rate of 2.1 live births per couple. Here are the rates, in live births per couple, for the two best studied years:
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The above figures were collected by the World Bank.
Every First World nation has suffered a decline in birth rate. Only one – Israel – has maintained a birth rate above replacement level. Why?
It’s actually fairly simple, if one looks at the balance of incentives and disincentives that applies to a married couple:
Incentives to reproduce:
- Love of children;
- Desire for progeny;
- Religious influences.
Disincentives to reproduce:
- Careerism;
- Fear of childbirth;
- Need for two incomes;
- Fading of religious faith;
- Difficulty of raising children;
- Preference for unhindered mobility;
- Fear of divorce and its consequences;
- Delayed marriage / extended adolescence;
- Extinction of the three-generation household.
The incentives are few; the disincentives are many.
A recent post from Western-preservationist group Occidental Revival exhorts the reader to press for political incentives to reproduce: essentially, subsidies for having children. But this is not in the cards, for a simple reason: Politicians weigh the votes and influence of the already-living more heavily than those of the not-yet-born. Add to that the pressures on lawmakers exerted by environmentalists, population-control groups, and other anti-natalist forces, and the prospects for public policies that encourage children look pretty bleak.
Occidental Revival also mentions “promotion of homosexuality, abortion on demand, feminism, hedonism, materialism, etc.” as anti-natal influences, and these should not be dismissed. However, they are peripheral to the larger problem, which has its roots in the transformation of children from a religious and social obligation and an addition to the family workforce to a luxury good: one we seek for the enjoyment it promises us.
Among the luxury goods of our time, children are one of the most burdensome and expensive to “own and maintain.” If you’d like a piercing comparison, consider the 2018 Mercedes S550. Acquisition cost: about $100,000. Maintenance cost over 20 years: on average, about $50,000. The current estimate of the cost of bearing and raising a child to age 18 in these United States is about $250,000 – and that’s before we factor in the cost of a “higher education.”
By now it should be clear that the correlation of forces is against childbearing in the First World. Nor can we expect a dramatic change in any of those forces in the near term. What, then, must we do?
Beats me, Gentle Reader! How do you encourage people to reproduce, against all the disincentives mentioned here, for the sake of their nation and culture? It’s almost self-contradictory to expect people to accept large burdens and costs for the sake of a future they don’t expect to share. You’d have to feel a love of children, country, and culture far greater than most contemporary First Worlders feel.
Given the political contributions to our current situation, my first thought – isn’t it always? — is that those of us who cherish life and the values that made the West great could use a handy planetoid. But that’s much too large a subject to introduce at the end of an essay.
Thus Article The Disappearing West
You are now reading the article The Disappearing West with the link address https://theleknews.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-disappearing-west.html
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