Ruth Institute Blog

by Marcus Roberts

The challenge for Western countries in the short to medium term is that the number of workers that they have to support their economies (and social support networks) is declining or set to decline. We’ve banged on about this challenge here at Demography is Destiny for a while now.  According to a report in the Economist, not only will an aging population eventually result in fewer workers, but as those workers age they will also be less productive.    Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

In addition to family structure and economics, the World Family Map project is looking at family “processes” such as adult satisfaction with their family life, agreement or otherwise about household work, family discussions on social issues and family meals. It is also looking at family culture — attitudes towards single motherhood, working mothers, children’s need for a mother and a father, and trust within families.

On these measures the richest societies are not necessarily top performers. Read more…

by SBrinkmann

A new government report reveals that U.S. births fell in 2011 for the fourth straight year, although the decline was just one percent, less than the two to three percent drop seen in recent years. Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

While looking at a new outbreak of Boomer-bashing in the US media — provoked by continuing economic woes and the election –I came across a columnist in the Atlantic magazine who gets what the basic problem is. “Demographics are economics,” says Derek Thompson. How true.

One way to think about the Great Recession is like a great pause button. Read more…

Respecting life “from womb to tomb” includes the long part in the middle. In this beautiful short video, Rev. Robert Sirico reminds us that free enterprise is the system best-suited to human flourishing.

By Maggie Gallagher

The arguments for gay marriage get ever stranger:

This week in Indiana, Jill Cook, an executive from engine-maker Cummins Inc., testified that a proposed state marriage amendment “jeopardizes our ability to be competitive in global markets.” Read more…

by Ryan T. Anderson

February 2, 2012 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4646

Neither liberal nor libertarian, a principled conservative way of helping the poor.

The loudest voices in our national debates about political economy tend to be libertarians and social welfare statists. To our detriment, most public policy discussions are filtered through these two lenses. At the same time, we tend to conflate the policy issues facing our nation as if they were one and the same. Read more…

Learning from the demographics. (From nationalreview.com.)

Last week, when reviewing some of the family talk on the campaign trail, I mentioned a new study co-authored by Brad Wilcox called The Sustainable Demographic Dividend. As many National Review Online readers know, W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He is also the president of Demographic Intelligence, the premier provider of U.S. fertility forecasts and fertility analytics for companies in the financial-services, food, household-products, insurance, juvenile-products, medical, and retail sectors. He talks to National Review Online about what exactly fertility and marriage have to do with the economy. –KJL Read more…

W. Bradford Wilcox, who consults on U.S. demographics, is the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

The long-term fortunes of the modern economy depend in part on the strength and sustainability of the family, both in relation to fertility trends and to marriage trends. This basic, but often overlooked, principle is now at work in the current global economic crisis. Read more…

by Christopher White 

Based on projections from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), world population will reach seven billion by the end of this month. According to Hania Zlotnik, director of DESA’s Population Division, “It is very important for the future of humanity that the young people of today have on average fewer children than their parents did.” Read more…