Reason on the baby bust

In addressing public policies intended to promote childbirth through cash incentives (which she rightly points out don't work), Howley writes:

The more relevant question, and the one rarely broached, is whether women who choose not to have children should be forced to subsidize those who do.

Well, should people who choose not to go into the armed services be forced to subsidize those who do? Society is more than a collection of individuals. Who do the childless think will support them in their old age? In Europe and the US, there's an enormous problem right around the corner, as the Boomers age and expect Social Security and Medicare paid for by a generation smaller than their own. It's a nice, tidy libertarian point, that the childless shouldn't have to subsidize the childbearing. But if that's your view, then you should also sign on to the view that the working population should not have to subsidize the retired. Do we really want to live in that kind of society? I don't.

Howley also implies that racism is at the heart of the concerns of "many if not most of the people preoccupied with fertility rates":

The question isn't about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it's about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn's America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

Ah, libertarians. Why on earth should it be controversial that French people would like France of the future to be inhabited by French people, and not people(s) who do not carry French culture, but another culture? Why, for that matter, shouldn't the people of any nation wish to see their own people and culture thrive in their own homeland, which necessarily implies that other peoples and cultures do not displace them? To call this racist is to short-circuit the debate, declaring the question off-limits by casting the motives of the one asking it into disrepute. I think France would be a culturally poorer place if it were to become a Muslim country; I would expect a Muslim to think the same of Turkey if it were to become a Christian country. Only liberals and libertarians, whose conception of personhood is defined by autonomous individualism, find this to be a problem, instead of the normal thing.

Howley goes on to say that fear of demographic decline tends to accompany social anxiety about overall national decline. France became obsessed with this in the late 19th century after Germany invaded, she writes. OK, fine. But again, being aware that there are political, social and psychological explanations for a phenomenon does not mean that the phenomenon is inconsequential. Howley devotes exactly one paragraph in her very long piece to discussing the hard-core reality of demographic decline:

Quantum or otherwise, a demographic shift does require adjustment, notably of pension programs that are built on faulty assumptions of endless expansion. Fertility declines alter the basic age structure of a society, much as the baby boom did a half-century ago. Neither gradual declines nor gradual increases in population need be destructive, but the former will require concrete changes in redistribution schemes and a reshuffling of resources.

Like what? How, exactly, is that going to work in an advanced economy with a population accustomed to welfare-state protections? How does a nation field an army in a time of declining population? These are not matters of merely "shuffling" resources.

Howley's piece is vastly better than the notorious Nation article from earlier this year, which described all concerns about demographic decline as a right-wing conspiracy. So it was particularly disappointing to see her invoking Hitler:

At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society's ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of "Mother Russia" and "Mother India." Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the "boundary markers" of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys' motto was: "Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing." For girls: "Be faithful; be pure; be German." Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

Again: fear of population decline may be invoked and stoked by bad people. It may emerge out of general anxiety about national decline. It may come from racist motive. But the numbers don't lie. For whatever reason, or set of reasons, population is declining dramatically worldwide, and there will be incredibly disruptive consequences from this fact. Just because something validates the concerns of social conservatives doesn't make it untrue, or unimportant. Of course cultural liberals and libertarians worry about this stuff: it means that their individualist utopia is unsustainable. I'd worry too if I were in their shoes.

UPDATE: Via Ross, we learn of a debate between Will Wilkinson and Megan McArdle over this issue. Here's Wilkinson:

The way I see it, those obsessed with fertility are people who think the culture they desire cannot possibly win the argument against competing cultures. So, they conclude, it's down to brute baby-making force: the culture that wins the fertility war wins the culture war. In contrast, I think liberal market culture has such immense, salient rewards (wealth, longevity, happiness, etc.) that it is not only possible to win the argument, but that we are in fact winning it. Of course, part of the winning is dynamist cultural synthesis. So if you've got a conservative, zoological view of cultural preservation which fixes on the importance of high-fidelity copying of inessential aspects of a culture's history (costumes, holidays, rites, cuisine, skin colors etc.), you're going to have a hard time of it. But if you care about the essential core of liberal modernity, you should be delighted with how things are going. You'll eat your szechuan taco pizza and you'll love it.

To which McArdle responds, in part:

The overwhelming evidence is that when it comes to culture, numbers trump ideas. in the successive invasions of England, for example, the locals always won unless they were wiped out; the conquerors assimilated. Or look at America. More people here claim descent from the Irish than the English; numerically, Irish Americans are the largest single-country ethnic group. Yet our culture is much more heavily derived from English Prostentantism than from Irish Catholicism. That's because the earlier waves of assimilated immigrants had adopted the fundamentally British culture of America, and outnumbering the Irish, forced them to assimilate. Successive waves of immigrants have each left their cultural mark, changing (I devoutly believe) us for the better, and also to something that cannot be called British. But the dominant strain remains English. Cultures that "win" the argument in territory outside their own do so by killing, swamping, or removing the previous inhabitants.

Food is awesome, but it is culturally trivial. A little while ago, I said that I thought that liberals underestimated the extent to which the welfare state is spending down cultural capital accumulated in an era before safety nets. Similarly, I think libertarians tend to vastly underestimate the extent to which liberalism and free markets are sustained not by proclaimed belief or legal institutions, but by unobserved cultural norms that are transmitted slowly, if at all. Mexico can see all the things that are better about the US, none of which are particularly difficult to reproduce at the institutional level, but enforcement depends on things like a visceral indignant reaction to policemen who take bribes, rather than an attempt to work the system by developing friends in the police force.

You'll want to go read Ross's take on this, and the great comments at his site.