European demographers decry depopulation
Although the popular mind on both continents remains unaware of the problem, both European and American demographers have begun raising the alarm about the consequences of apparently intractably low birth rates. According to recent documentary, The Grandchild Gap, which the United States’ Public Broadcasting Service ran on 18 April 1997, a number of influential demographers and policy analysts identify depopulation as the “number one social problem” facing societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Hosted by Ben Wattenberg, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the documentary studied the problem’s roots and breadth as well as its likely consequences and what might be done to reverse the trend.
The demographic marathon
Wattenberg placed the discussion of Falling American birth rates securely in the context of long-term trends. Based on 1790 census data, America’s total fertility rate (TFR) almost 200 years ago stood at about 8 children per woman’s reproductive lifetime. However, it fell steadily over time until it hit a low or 2.2 during the depression of the l930’s.
The generation that passed through that experience and World War II reversed the demographic slide somewhat by giving birth to the so-called Baby Boom generation, but that upward tick in the long decline proved purely temporary. The US TFR has fallen to 1.98, below the replacement figure of 2.2. In Europe, the broadcast pointed out, fertility rates are even lower, with Germany coming in 1.3 and Italy at 1.2.
“Rome has been called the Eternal City,” Wattenberg pointed out, “but how eternal can a city or country be when it doesn’t come close to replacing its population over time?”
The Midas touch
Over the course of the program, Wattenberg interviewed not only demographers and policy analysts but ordinary people from different generations about their own marital arid parental choices and expectations. Many of these choices, it became very clear, pitted children against possessions in a contest where children lost out.
“The ideal number would be three children,” said one young Italian woman, “but I also like to work. Therefore I would not like to give up my job, even if I realize it sounds selfish. .. It’s difficult to manage both work and children.” Another young woman commented that contraception has broken the link between sex, marriage and children that existed in the past.
“Also the fact that people use contraceptives avoids having children before getting married,” she said, adding, “And having sex today is a lot simpler, one does not have to get married to have sex, one can do it before getting married.”
Another woman, a mother who would like to be a grandmother, commented: “Today, kids get married later in life than our generation did,” she said, “and they face bigger problems, such as no jobs, no housing. So they have to postpone marriage.”
Students from both France and the United States that Wattenberg interviewed expressed similar priorities:
“The problem today is that if you wait until you have enough money to start a family you end up too busy and have no time for your children,” said one young Frenchman. “And even if you decide you want to start a family right away, you probably don’t have the money to support children, so you end up waiting anyway. In my opinion, it’s a vicious circle.”
One young American woman told Wattenberg that it’s very important for her to have “established” herself before she begins a family:
It is very important for me to establish myself in my career before I enter into marriage and start having kids because I want to know that I’ll be able to give my children and my husband my full self as an individual and I think that I will be able to find myself by the time I have established myself in my career and who I am and that is around age 30.
Paying the piper
Demographers and policy analysts in both the United States and Europe are far from sanguine about the children many of their countrymen are choosing not to have.
Antonio Golini, a demographer for the University of Rome, estimated Italy’s population at “more or less” 57 million and declared that, should fertility rates remain unchanged ‘“200 years ahead [the] Italian population will disappear.” Although Golini doubted that the situation would grow that severe, he did state that another 30 or 40 years at the current fertility level will mean that Italy’s population will be reduced by one third.
Jean-Claude Chenais, a senior fellow at the Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris echoed Golini’s concerns. Responding to a question from Wattenberg about Frances persistent fertility gap (the amount between France’s TFR of l.7 and replacement), Chenais replied:
“That’s a big gap and the real problem is that the gap…is a long term gap. We’ve had this gap, now, more than two decades. And we don’t see any prospect of change, or reversal. It’s permanent.” And Chenais explicitly described how important this gap is for France’s future:
That is the most important problem. I would say the first, problem number one, you know. It’s a problem of values, you know. We in the West cherish values like freedom. And, you know, do we really have the freedom to make a choice to terms of family size? I think it’s not true. It’s easy to say no to a child. We have free abortion, free contraception, free sterilization, you know. It is easy to say, to put up a barriers…
Henri Leridon, another demographer for the same institute, added: “…Now people begin their life, their sexual life, under a permanent regime of contraception. I mean, these new methods, like the Pill and the IUD, you take them and then you have to decide when you stop using them to have a child, which is quite different from how it happened in previous generations.”
Karl Zinsmeister, editor of the American Enterprise magazine and a frequent author on children and demographics, laid the blame for the current birth dearth squarely on the battle between material interests and parental interests, “I think there has to be an accounting,” Zinsmeister said, “and at some point you have to say what am I willing to give up to have all these things because you can’t have strong families and good children and all the great outcomes that you want unless you: give up a little careerism, give up a little income, give up a little freedom, give up a little liberation.”
Pro-natalist remedies?
While Wattenberg noted that while people in both traditionally ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ camps agree that the current situation poises a problem for societies, there was little agreement as to how to fix it or even, whether, fertility rates can ever be returned to an even replacement level.
Much of the discussion revolved around whether public or private means would do more to help lift the TFR in the United States and Europe.
Harriet Presser, director of the Center on Population, Gender and Social Inequity doubted whether any public or private effort would, in the end, would have much of an impact on the problem:
I think we can predict fairly well if we had a huge incentive, financial incentive, that we could effect the timing of birth… Whether or not it would lead to having much larger families than one or two children on average I don’t think so… what’s the incremental advantage to the couple or to the women who may be living as a single mother… what is it to her advantage to have three children rather than two, when there are alternative opportunities in society?
