What to Expect When No One's Expecting

Walter Berglund, the protagonist of Jonathan Franzen's sometimes infuriating, often excellent 2010 novel Freedom is something of a liberal hypocrite. A one time apostle of Paul Ehrlich and population control activists, Berglund settled down in gentrifying St. Paul with his wife Patty and did the unthinkable: reproduced. . . twice! Berglund is burdened by this guilt his entire life, despite his love for his kids, and tries to recompense his misdeeds through a lifetime of service to the planet he sees himself as complicit in destroying. A bumbling sort of hero, Walter gets into some tangles even in that endeavor, but that is not really the point here.

Population control was once en vogue and is still rather blithely accepted by a significant portion of our nation's intellectuals as well as the average person who through trickle-down idiocy has come to accept overpopulation as fact. Pundit blowhard chieftain Thomas Friedman wrote Hot, Flat, and Crowded in 2008, and though he doesn't prescribe one child policies or anything as likely to elicit negative reaction the underlying assumption for the final descriptor is that our planet is perilously crowded with creatures possessing opposable thumbs and we need to ramp down productivity (so to speak) until our planet can heal itself. 

In other words, the danger to humanity rests for most on the side of overpopulation. Rarely do we see the opposite argument made: that the waning birthrate in this country and throughout the industrialized (and mostly entire) world is actually a dangerous, potentially unreversible reality that will have far-reaching consequences for pretty much everyone alive today. Which is why Jonathan Last wrote the cleverly titled What to Expect When No One's Expecting, a small book with big implications.

Last begins by recounting the time early in his marriage when he and his wife lived in a yuppie district of D.C., one of those neighborhoods where the dog boutiques outnumber the baby stores. An overwhelming majority of the inhabitants did not have kids and once you decided to take the plunge, the astronomical pricing of the neighborhood made it unrealistic for most to afford to live there with kids. To the suburbs, breeders! 

This little anecdote underscores that while children are increasingly valued in our culture (the $700 strollers, baby yoga sessions, preschool Mandarin classes, etc.) they are at the same time decreasingly present (shades of supply-side economics at work here). In other words, children are not required for help on the farm and most all of them live to adulthood these days so we don't have nearly as many. Perhaps even more importantly for our culture, the purpose of life is now self-fulfillment and raising kids is generally acknowledged to suck. Times they have a changed, and now children are more  of a personal accessory, something validating adulthood and accomplishment and to boast about at parties, than they are, say, a blessing from the Lord or, to take a different tack, necessary propagations in a Darwinian world. Or, going to neither extreme, something intrinsically worthwhile, even if they make life hard.

There are many factors contributing to the decline in fertility around the globe, and Last aims a sawed-off shotgun at our culture to try and hit them all. Some are admirable: the increasing freedom and equality of women in the past 50 years. Some are pernicious: the hookup culture and abortion. Some are the fruits of unforeseen consequences: Social Security and the welfare state for the elderly. And, as Last readily concedes, it is impossible to pinpoint a single cause or even the biggest cause. What we have in Western culture (though this is far from a Western problem; Japan is the reigning king of the dire consequences of decreased fertility) is a cocktail of elements all contributing to making babies less ubiquitous, desired, and necessary (in the short run, of course). And the long run effects of this trend are not potentially, but inevitably disastrous. 

Consider economics, for a moment. When Social Security was put in place by FDR in the 30s, the average life expectancy was 58.1 for men and 61.6 for women. So the number of people qualifying for Social Security payouts was exceedingly small. Over 40 workers contributed to the system for every beneficiary. Social Security, for those who followed the work of Bernie Madoff, is a Ponzi scheme, and as Madoff's dissatisfied clients found out, Ponzi schemes only work if you keep getting more suckers workers to buy in at the bottom level. When you combine low fertility with increased life expectancy, and refuse to touch the sacred cow of Social Security, you end up in a disturbing place. Where there used to be 40 workers for every beneficiary, today that number is at 2.5. By 2050 it will be under 2.0. Accordingly, Social Security taxes have been on the rise and can only be expected to continue to rise until the system implodes, we are annexed by China, or the Lord returns.  The low birthrate, coupled with an increasing lifespan makes for an unsustainable imbalance between the young and the old. Our population will soon look like an inverted pyramid, with ever increasing numbers at the top and decreasing numbers at the bottom. Which is good for a population. . . never. That is never a good thing and has never proved reversible.

Now consider the sociology of Social Security. Kids used to be a requirement if for no other reason than you needed someone to take care of you when you got older. It may not be the most romantic reason to have kids, but it is practical. Today, in a socialist dream, you have the state to take care of you. And here is the kicker, the state will even help you if you failed to contribute any suckers workers to the bottom of the Ponzi scheme. In other words, there is almost no practical reason in our culture to have children. You can refuse to have kids, put in your Social Security throughout your working life, and then overdraw based on what you put in from the paychecks of your friends' kids. 

I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush here. There are people unable to have kids and people who should not have kids (look at me sounding like a eugenicist), but that is not most people. Most people in our country who don't have kids make this decision as part of the proliferating "lifestyle choices" that must be ever-validated in our culture. (Unless, of course, that lifestyle choice involves having numerous children. Then, sadly, you are a nutjob.) And I don't think it does injustice to the word, or the sentiment behind most people not having kids, to call this selfish. People don't like that word, because it invokes judgment, which is again only proper when directed toward poor white people and the religious in our culture, but no one I ever met who has told me they never want kids has ever given me anything other than a selfish reason (i.e. travel, free time, don't want a real job). But in reality the only thing that allows people to make this "lifestyle choice" is that other people still keep having kids so the non-breeders can live off of the Social Security those kids keep pumping into the system. Again, not feelings, like "I feel bad that you called me selfish," but reality.

I am not here saying that we should only allow procreators to draw Social Security--that would be incredibly creepy legislation--, but that when the entire structure of a culture incentivizes people to refrain from having kids then that is a very dangerous place for a culture to go. As well as irrevocable.  Last runs through a catalogue of the social policies of Western Europe designed to reinvigorate the anemic fertility rates of our cosmopolitan models, and as a group they have failed. No matter how much time you give a mother (or father) off of work, no matter how great the government-sponsored daycare is, no matter what the cash payout tax refund is for bringing baby into the world, the birthrate refuses to budge. Which leads to a conclusion about government intervention in fertility: it is far easier to social engineer decreases in total fertility than it is to reverse engineer the previous efforts and inspire more robust fertility.

Some people will point to immigrant populations as a way to solve the problem. Latin American immigrants have a higher total fertility than a native U.S. of A'er, just as the majority Muslim immigrant population in Western Europe has a higher fertility rate than the native population. But this is an extremely short-term solution. Leaving off issues of immigrant integration, Last shows that within a generation of residency in the United States, Latin American fertility drops to levels just as low as natives. It makes no sense to keep allowing more and more immigration as a way to grab up the one immigrant generation of higher fertility. Talk about creepy policy, as well as a weird case of robbing Peter to pay Paul: this might help arrest the demographic plunge of the United States, but it would almost certainly hurt the country whose people we were pilfering. 

The really only other significant reason to have children, other than the practical reasons that used to exist, is because you believe them to be a blessing, despite the cost. Put another way, no one is going to all of a sudden start having kids because they believe it is their civic duty. We are no longer communally-minded. We are each of us, if not rugged, then pacified and entertained individualists. Freedom, to borrow a turn of phrase from John Milton, exists in license not true liberty in twenty-first century America. Put yet another way, in our current cultural climate you would only expect to find people committed to community and with ambitions beyond self-fulfillment having kids. People most often found in religious communities. Which is, in fact, what we are seeing. 

The total fertility rate for the American woman is at 2.01, or right about replacement rate, and dropping. However, if you break this down for women who attend church regularly, the total fertility rate jumps to 2.54. I know, I know, the stereotypes abound here, but it appears as if committed religious believers are the only people actively staving off massive population decline and the disastrous future that entails. As religion continues to wane in our country, it is difficult to see a secular source of such devoted childbearing arising from the ashes of religion.

Last's book struggles, as all such books struggle, when it comes to making recommendations. Prophets of doom are great at diagnosing and poor at prescribing. He suggests more family friendly tax policy and work situations, but he spent a good chunk of his book talking about how such policies are impotent elsewhere. If you take away both the economic/social incentives for having kids as well as breed an intense narcissism directed toward self-fulfillment and the search for the ever elusive self, it is difficult seeing how another month of maternity leave is going to make it seem worthwhile to invest 18 years plus (30 is the new 18) in raising multiple children.

So I throw my hands up in despair as I close, not knowing what to do. My despair isn't merely about the harsh economic future of a culture that is top heavy with old people, though that is certainly a daunting prospect (Japan recently became the first country wherein adult diapers outsold baby diapers, which I find to be extremely sad). My despair is that we have lost the language to call people to repentance. We have lost any notion that you can rebuke in kindness. More than that, we have lost almost any notion that we exist in community with one another, and are inextricably bound to one another. The most proffered defense for previously illicit activities is "I'm not hurting anyone else, so why do you care?" But we are not islands, and hell is Sartre's existentialism, not other people. Individual choices invariably effect the group, and my generation's great individual reticence to be parents is going to yield unimaginable long-term consequences for our culture.