Ruth Institute Blog

The Social Retreat from Children and How it is Affecting America

Interesting for those who are interested.

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…

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…

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…

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…