Down goes the population

Living at home with your parents is a very powerful contraception.

- British politician David Willetts quoted in the NYTimes’ very interesting story on the declining birthrate of Europe.

I had some major problems with the article, because author Russell Shorto asserts that the U.S. birthrate is higher than Europe’s due to more equality in home tasks (Daddy Day Care), but ignores the fact that we’re really not having that many kids when exempting the Hispanic birth rate. He also really doesn’t take issue with the true economics of childbirth or related changes in family structure (i.e., the death of the extended family and the consumerist push for self-sufficiency). One of my friends is an Albanian who is expecting to have many children. Her family is more like a tribe in which her myriad relatives help each other out, meaning she’ll more or less — as I understand it — never have to pay for daycare. She and her husband aren’t facing a new mortgage, she’s moving in with his family. I wonder if we’ll head back to big clans now that the nuclear family has proven wasteful and decadent.

Shorto also doesn’t really explore intellect/education as a predictor (or non predictor) of average childbirth rates. I’d bet that more highly educated individuals tend to have fewer children so that they can pay for them all (especially when paying means paying for their higher education costs as well). Meanwhile, developed countries have lost manufacturing and the good jobs that go with it, affecting the other side of the educational gamut.

This wonderfully blasphemous Newsweek piece about how parenthood makes people miserable, has some decent stats on the rising cost of “you looked so damned sexy, I couldn’t hold back”:

A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated—it has become more expensive. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs anywhere from $134,370 to $237,520 to raise a child from birth to the age of 17—and that’s not counting school or college tuition. No wonder parents are feeling a little blue.

A commenter on Shorto’s site gets in a good hit:

Mr. Shorto-
I enjoyed your recent article in the New York Times on the European demographic problem (”No Babies?” 06/29/08), where you touched on many issues that demographers, sociologists, public policy analysts and political scientists have been addressing to a smaller audience for years. However, I might point out one concern about your presentation to the average NYTimes reader: the American replacement rate is almost entirely bolstered, as the data from recent years has told us, by the Hispanic population in the US, while the replacement rate of the non-Hispanic White population is almost as low as the “lowest low” average in Western Europe. A number of academic studies have been done regarding this issue and its policy implications, but for just some encapsulated figures, you can go here.

The notion that American fathers’ have been shamed through social mores into a more equal sharing of household work that compensates for a lack of generosity by the government’s welfare programs has been debunked by various household surveys that have suggested that the division of household labor between men and women in America is almost as low as at any point in the past few decades, and is nowhere near as high as the more egalitarian household sharing in the Nordic countries whose population replacement rates outstrip the non-Hispanic White populations’ in the US.

The flexible system that you allude to is not actually allowing middle and upper class White America to have more children; the US counterparts are having about as many children compared to the European educated classes who are the focus of your article. Much like in Europe with the tensions between old Europeans and Muslim communities, the reality of who is having children is not White America, but Hispanic America, and that is how the US manages to look like the “sparkling exception” as you so phrased in your article.

-Sarah Shair-Rosenfield
Ph.D. Student
Department of Political Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

While I have huge respect for his specific inclusion of that letter on his site (it’s not a message board, but a web page where he has deliberately reprinted letters), I wonder why he basically hid this information in the article, or why he didn’t know it after all the research he obviously did.