Ruth Institute Blog

Lefties are fond of condemning the Right for our worries about Demographic Winter.

They’re fond of condemning us, but not so keen about disputing us.  That’s because the facts needed to rebut our worries are few and far between.

But there are points to be made in rebuttal.  I’ve never seen any such point wielded by a Lefty.  So, let me call your attention to one made by an EEEEEEEEVIL Right winger, John Derbyshire.  It comes from this week’s broadcast of his gloomy but hilarious podcast “Radio Derb.”

This is a favorite selling point of the immigration boosters. Japan, China, the European countries all have below-replacement birthrates, and so aging populations. Read more…

Childlessness among women aged 40-44 has increased dramatically since even the baby bust years of the 1970s.

(CBS) Nearly 1 in 5 American women beyond childbearing years never gave birth as fewer couples, particularly higher-educated whites, view having children as necessary to a good marriage. Read more…

The Social Retreat from Children and How it is Affecting America

Interesting for those who are interested.

Interesting to see another perspective on this issue since it has been hotly debated on this blog. More food for thought:

Charlie Butts – OneNewsNow

According to newly released government statistics, the U.S. birth rate has dropped below replacement level.

The fact that the birth rate is falling comes as no surprise to Colin Mason, director of media production at the Population Research Institute (PRI), who explains that “our birth rate’s actually been dropping for a while.” Read more…

Ari’s post about Philip Longman’s book, The Empty Cradle, reminded me that Dr J’s Bookshelf has several titles on Demographic Decline. My little collection proves Ari’s point: concern about demographic decline is not the exclusive province of the Left. including Longman’s book. Longman is at the New America Foundation and Schwartz Senior Fellow at the Washington Monthly. His latest book is called, The Next Progressive Era.
Read more…

I am flattered by the attention from Daily Kos blogger, Dante Atkins. Sadly, this post is short on substance, and long on ad hominem attacks and innuendo. I will leave aside for now, his silly attack on our logo, of all things. I will ignore his mangling of the Biblical story of Ruth, except to note one thing: I chose Ruth because she is a unifying figure, loved by all the major faith groups. Catholics love her; Jews love her; Evangelicals love her; Mormons love her. Everybody loves Ruth, it seems, except for leftist bloggers. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine how leftists like Dante expect to build a coalition when they alienate every major faith tradition in America. Read more…

Phillip Longman in his book The Empty Cradle discusses  the possible  social impact of declining birth rates.  Longman is a  progressive.  His most recent book is one that praises the politics of the Progressive Era.  The politics of the Progressive Era gives right wingers like me nausea.  Read more…

The Upcoming Demographic Winter

There is a name for people who don’t believe that there will be a demographic winter.  That word is “innumerate.”  In other words, those people just can’t do math. As the famous Teen Talk Barbie once said “Math Class is Hard.”  Fortunately for Dante, I’m here to administer a bit of remediation. Read more…

A great article about the coming demographic winter.  From the article:

News of a population bust might come as a surprise to many Americans. More than two centuries after English scholar Thomas Malthus argued that population growth exceeded the earth’s ability to feed us—“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he wrote—the media continue to warn us about impending environmental catastrophe and mass starvation caused by an exploding human population. These Malthusian alarms persist even though the last 200 years have proved Malthus completely wrong. As the world’s population shot up, starting around the time of the Industrial Revolution, worldwide standards of living rose in tandem. People proved far more resourceful in expanding food production, tapping new veins of natural resources, and inventing technologies to accommodate a growing population than Malthus dreamed possible. When mass deprivation has occurred in modern times, it has invariably resulted from political tyranny and social chaos, not from an inability to derive enough resources from the earth.

Wow. I love the way this guy thinks.

Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com

…Take the Optimum Population Trust, a superannuated gaggle of gimlet-eyed, thin-lipped Gradgrinds who out-Scrooge Scrooge. Their aim is to slash the number of unfeathered bipeds who pollute the earth with carbon emissions. “Everything we manage to achieve for the natural environment is being wiped out by the nearly 80 million extra people each year who need to use up space and resources,” they claim. They have even launched PopOffsets, a charity which offsets your carbon footprint by reducing the number of babies in the developing world. And they have the nerve to describe themselves as a “charity”!

I can just imagine them counting up their miserabilist PopOffset dollars: “Another $7 for the charity, one less baby in Ghana; $21 for the charity, 3 less in Sierra Leone; $35 for the charity; 5 less in Chad.” And after a heavy night out on New Year’s Eve adding to their carbon footprint with champers and fireworks, the new hair of the dog is a donation to PopOffset to scrub a few more babies from the population of Zaire.

Continue reading.

Time to start having kids, China. If you still can.

Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com

China’s rapid economic development and America’s evident vulnerabilty after the Global Financial Crisis could make the Chinese a bit smug. But as leading demographer Nicholas Eberstadt points out in a frightening article in the Far Eastern Economic Review, China faces gigantic economic problems as the legacy of its one-child policy. Read more…

By Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, first published in the National Catholic Register

“‘Gayby Boom’ Fueled by Same-Sex Parents” screamed a headline on the website of ABC News this past summer. “Post-1980s Children of Gay Parents Thrive in School, More Open Society,” the subhead declared. Was there some new information in this story? Nope. It was just another human-interest story in the noble-homosexuals-who-overcome-adversity-and-stay-true-to-themselves template.

Unfortunately for ABC, a closer look at the source of the few facts in this story tells another story — one the “gay rights” lobby and its allies in the media probably would rather you didn’t hear: Same-sex “marriage” is a completely disproportionate response to an overwrought problem. Most of the feature consisted of interviews with same-sex couples who have raised children together. But among the obvious ploy for sympathy were a few facts, including this eyepopper: “Just under 1% of all couples in the U.S. — or 594,391 people — identify themselves as gay, lesbian or transgender, and about 20% of them are raising children under the age of 18.”

Yes, you read that correctly: Two-tenths of 1% of couples in America are same-sex couples raising children. Read more…

Pete Chagnon – OneNewsNow -

A United Nations group that promotes abortion has released some controversial recommendations concerning “global warming.”

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), birth control and access to family-planning facilities can be a valuable weapon in the fight against supposed “climate change.” The UNFPA sites overpopulation as one of the factors in the earth’s “capacity to adjust” to climate change. Read more…

Carolyn Moynihan, Mercatornet.com

Here is something for the inaugural European Union president, Herman van Rompuy, to put his stamp on: the revival of the European family. The EU is very active in telling member states what to do about certain social issues — for example, condemning a recent Lithuanian law which prohibits promotion of “homosexual, bisexual, polygamous relations” among children under the age of 18 — but it is dragging its feet on the most important social issue of all: the protection and support of the family. Read more…

Michael Cook, Mercatornet.com

The message is finally getting through: the population bomb has fizzled out and fertility is falling nearly everywhere in the world.

Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country’s population to slow down and eventually to stabilise… The move to replacement-level fertility is one of the most dramatic social changes in history. Read more…

Carolyn Moynihan, Mercatornet.com

Struggling with family decay and population decline, Russia wants the UN to get down to tin tacks on the subject of human rights.

Let’s face it: there is a lot wrong with Russia. Twenty years after the fall of communism the man who gave the Soviet system the coup de grace, Mikhail Gorbachev, is complaining that there is no democracy in the country and that the Kremlin is not interested in fighting corruption or solving the murders of prominent critics such as journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Read more…

Dermot Grenham, Mercatornet.com

The received wisdom among demographers and other social sciences is that as countries develop economically and socially their fertility rates decline. However, a recent article in Nature¹ has shown that at higher levels of development, as measured by the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), the fall in fertility goes into reverse. Could this be the answer to the problem of ageing populations? Read more…

Vincenzina Santoro Mercatornet.com

Is Italy breaking out of a demographic nose-dive?

Each year the Italian Ministry responsible for health presents a report to Parliament on abortion trends. Data presented a few weeks ago by Undersecretary Eugenia Maria Roccella of the Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Policy brings encouraging news: Abortions have continued to decline among adult women and minors, an overwhelming percentage of Italian doctors refuse to perform abortions, and Italy has a low contraceptive prevalence rate. Read more…

By by Helen Alvaré, J.D.
Senior Fellow in Law and Ruth Institute Advisory Board Member

In my last column, I concluded that while public and private actors have taken many different and sometimes logical approaches to reducing out of wedlock pregnancies, they have also missed a crucial aspect of the problem: the difficulties men and women are experiencing in their relationships with one another, as evidenced by their unwillingness to commit to one another, even after a baby is conceived.

Read more…

William West

Britain is bracing itself for the ageing of its population with the latest figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the proportion of people aged over 65 is set to rise dramatically. The release of the latest figures come at a time when Britain is already struggling to fund its benefits and health care systems moving commentators to warn that too little is being done to prepare for the ageing of the population. Read more…