May 18, 2018

Where have all the babies gone?

Reducing the population is a big Greenie goal and they have convinced some foolish women to make the life-shattering decision to avoid having babies.  Women that foolish  and unnatural are probably not much of a loss from the gene pool however.

And it is not only conservatism that tends to stand athwart the trend to a baby drought.  Many religious people and economists also deplore it.  The Catholic church has an adamantine opposition to contraception -- so adamantine that even the heretical Pope Francis suports it.  But, like many church teachings, that one has largely fallen by the wayside.  There are now few Catholics who heed it.  Thank goodness for the Mormons, I guess.  And a shout-out to the remarkable Duggar family is surely appropriate here too.

As we see below, however, the baby bust has now hit the USA, mainly because minority women too have now caught on to the trend.  Prosperity has now influenced them too.  And it does seem clear that prosperity is the culprit -- enabled by the pill, of course.  When you have a  kindly welfare state to help you when you are sick or old, who needs kids?

Answer:  Everybody and nobody.  Nobody in the USA now needs kids for economic reasons.  But life is not all economics.  We do have other needs and other pleasures.  And babies are big in both those arenas.  Children are undoubtedly life's greatest pleasure.  As  ever, there is some pain with the gain but it is only the very unlucky where the pain is not well worthwhile.  And for real women, a baby is a need.  The many women who undergo IVF are one testimony to that.

Still there are many women who have one or two children only and I am not going to criticize that decision.  The women who have more than two are the key, however.  We need them to make up the many women who, for good reasons or bad, have no children.

Politicians of course love babies.  They see them as future taxpayers.  So many countries -- France was the first, I think, now have pro-natalist policies of various sorts.  They do what they can to encourage and accelerate baby-making.  Singapore has probably the most extreme of such policies but Russia has made great efforts too.  Australia actually pays for babies.

So  should the USA go down that road too?  Does it all really matter?  I'm doubtful.

As a kid, my hair was so fair that I remember being addressed as "Snowy".  So I like to think that will continue.  I would like to think that there will be many like me in the future.  And, where I hang out most of the time, I do see quite a few mothers with little snowy-haired kids.  And I love to see them.

Intermarriage does of course threaten that.  Australia's big (about 5%) minority is Chinese and the young Chinese ladies go all out to snag a tall Caucasian man.  So a tall Caucasian man with a small Asian lady on his arm is rather frequently seen in my neck of the woods.  And I see the fruit of that too. I myself now have  Chinese relatives -- in that a tall, blue-eyed cousin of mine married a Chinese lady who produced a brilliant and  beautiful Eurasian daughter.  Eurasians are commonly seen as good-looking and tend to be smart too.  So more Eurasians would please me.  But I do regret than none of them will ever be "snowys".

But nonetheless, most people marry others with backgrounds similar to themselves.  Psychologists even have a term for it.  They call it "assortative mating".  So it seems to me that there will always be snowys somewhere, even if in diminished numbers.

But hair color is a side issue.  Are there any other reasons why we should fear population shrinkage? I can't see it.  The USA could end up like Brazil or Mexico, where people of European ancestry rule the roost, despite most of the population being of non-European origin.  And that means that the entire population is ghettoized.  Whites live in walled-off areas in habitations that are much like European habitations elsewhere in the world -- and non-whites live in often very rudimentary accommodation.  In short, people will rise to whatever standard of living that they are capable of.  There will be exceptions to that, of course, but it is averages I am concerned with here.

So if the baby shortage among American whites leads to a demographic overturn that leaves whites in a minority, I think the effect of that on white lifestyles will be small. The crime problem will increase and foolish government restrictions on business will limit prosperity but walled estates and security guards are just some of the measures that can keep crime at bay for the more affluent population segment, while foolish government regulations are regrettably common everywhere. Obama and the Greenies did their best to throttle American prosperity but even under that regime there was some economic growth.

Economic restrictions just lead to ways for circumventing them -- the famous "black markets" are a case in point and successful entrepreneurship just entails a degree of corruption.  Italy today is a very prosperous place with many rich people (and over a thousand admirals!) but by most estimates about a third of the Italian economy is "black".

So I think that even under some fairly dire outcomes of a prolonged baby bust among American whites, a white population will continue to flourish for a long time.

If the baby bust goes on for a very long time, American whites would of course die out -- to cheers from whatever is left of the Greenies -- but that is not likely.  Even in today's world there are many maternal women who just hunger for a baby so they will continue to reproduce themselves regardless of what others do.  It may be that the white population will come to consist entirely of their progeny  -- in which case we will see a white population INCREASE occurring, even if off a much smaller base than we have today.


The United States just hit a 40-year low in its fertility rate, according to numbers just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The 2017 provisional estimate of fertility for the entire U.S. indicates about 3.85 million births in 2017 and a total fertility rate of about 1.76 births per women.

These are low numbers: births were as high as 4.31 million in 2007, and the total fertility rate was 2.08 kids back then.

SOURCE





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