Mother's Day

Posted May 13, 2007

Mother’s Day began in Greece — and it may end there, too.

To the ancient Greeks, fertility was life. They worshiped mothers with a festival to Cybele, the mother of all gods. Modern Greeks worship motherhood, but they also avoid it. The average woman in Greece gives birth to 1.3 children. Over a generation or two, this is a problem for Greeks who prefer that Greece be populated with Greeks. Societies with birth rates this low enter a demographic death spiral from which they are unlikely to recover.

The Romans had a different holiday, Matronalia. Today, the Italian fertility rate is 1.29 births per woman — meaning that by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts or uncles.

Mothers Day began in the US when Julia Ward Howe, having rallied union troops for the Civil War with her song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", decided to import Mother’s Day to the US from the UK. She hoped to use the holiday to unite women against future wars but today restaurants, greeting card companies, and florists promote Mother’s Day, not pacifists.

Alone among developed countries, America maintains a fertility rate right at replacement level — 2.09 births per woman. The UK and Canada, in contrast have fertility rates of about 1.6 births per woman. Even China will shrink with a fertility rate of 1.75, achieved the wrong way and for the wrong reasons and featuring a dangerous gender imbalance.

The striking decline in developing country birthrates prompted Canadian polemicist Mark Steyn to write America Alone: the End of the World as We Know It, a conservative and occasionally very funny rant on "demography, Islam and civilizational exhaustion". Steyn notes that the developed world has gone from 30 per cent to 20 per cent of global population since 1970 and predicts dire consequences for Europe and Western values. Pausing to hyperventilate, he asserts that:

One way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by choosing what to worry about. The Western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we’ve developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared:

"In the 1970s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993." (Ehrlich famously lost money betting economists on these predictions).

Steyn misses no chance to blame the modern demographic predicament on "the progressive agenda" — abortion, gay marriage, the welfare state, and endlessly deferred adulthood. Some of his acolytes throw in premarital sex, STDs, hormones in beef, pollution, housing prices, working mothers, and Democrats.

Steyn notes with glee that:

In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans–and mostly red-state Americans…

To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA’s got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: Its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.

Steyn makes little effort to conceal his disdain for most things Islamic.

There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it’s easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

All of the concerns Steyn raises are not silly — and at times he is laugh-out-loud funny — but he has fallen into Paul Ehrlich’s trap of straightlining demographic trends ad absurdum until the outcomes get scary. Like the nineteenth century British economist Robert Malthus before him, Ehrlich grew population geometrically and food arithmetically until the planet starved to death. It didn’t happen that way: technology and trade completely changed the economics of food production and rich countries stopped breeding. To quote the great student of global demographics, Yogi Berra: "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future".

It turns out that predicting fertility rates is easier than Yogi thought because there is one major predictor of fertility rates.

Unfortunately for Steyn, it is not religion (Steyn points out that Islamic Yemen, Afghanistan, and Somalia all have very high birth rates. He conveniently neglects to note that Tunisia, Algeria, and Turkey all have birth rates below the US and below their population replacement rate).

Just as bad for Steyn is that the level of welfare provided by the state is also a poor predictor of fertility (Steyn gloats at western Europe’s declining population. But Eastern Europe and Russia, with vastly different welfare states, are also shrinking. The four lowest birthrates on the planet are found in Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, and Taiwan — hardly bastions of socialist paternalism).

The most reliable predictor of fertility is standard of living. Rich countries are not replacing their populations anywhere except in the United States — where affluent families have far fewer babies than do poor families — especially poor immigrant families. Islamic birth rates are higher because Islamic countries without oil are poorer. (Whether they are poorer because they are Islamic is a different question. The simple answer is almost surely yes — they are. But the problem is likely less Islam per se than how Islam evolved from the days when Muslim scientists and technologists led the world and it was Christians who were stuck in the Dark Ages).

The CIA Factbook makes it pretty easy to grab fertility rates (number of children born/woman) from each country in the world, as well as standard of living (GDP per person adjusted for "Purchasing Power Parity" so that a dollar buys the same amount of stuff in each country). Excel makes it easy to draw scatter diagrams. Put them together and here is what you get:

The red line denotes the replacement birth rate of 2.1 births per woman. The only countries to the right of the red line with $20,000 of GDP per capita are oil countries or Israel, with a birth rate of 2.38 children per woman and a GDP per capita of more than $25k. The US dot is next to the red line up high.

The reasons that birth rates drop as countries prosper are relatively well understood: children are no longer a major source of economic wealth and security, women have access to professions outside the home, and the cost of raising and educating children in rich economies skyrockets, so families have fewer kids.

This presents some problems, but overall is fine. Most demographers believe that our 6+ billion person planet will top out at 8-10 billion people before global population begins to decline. Poor countries, or poor people moving to richer countries, will contribute more than all of the world’s population growth as the world continues to march left and up this chart. This will surely cause social tensions — economic development always does. But economic development causes many fewer problems than grinding poverty. Mark Steyn and anyone else concerned about the rising share of the world that is poor should devote themselves not to the cause of Western fertility but to the cause of relieving third world, especially Islamic, poverty.

It is perhaps time to modify Harriet Beecher Stowe’s holiday. Mother’s Day in developed countries should be an opportunity to not only celebrate families but to celebrate women’s rights and opportunities. Along with trade, the education of girls and women and the protection of their economic and political rights are the single largest steps a country can take to rapidly increase its standard of living. It appears likely that future Mother’s Days will see fewer children celebrating with each mom. But they will have a lot more to celebrate.