Historically, humans have had children because children were productive assets. While children were a cost burden until age 9 in most traditional societies and their survival to age 21 was very low, the family produced many children to offset losses and the early cost. By their teens, the cost of the children was usually paid-off. From that point on the family benefited financially from having many children.
This reality prevailed until the beginning of the 20th Century when child mortality dropped rapidly and the costs of raising children extended until their late teens. Where this happened we see a rapid decline in the number of children per family.
I have observed that today and for the past half- century the willingness of married adults to have children and the number of offspring is related to a single issue in developed commercial societies: is the population optimistic about the future? If the answer is positive then the population is growing, and if the answer is negative the population is declining.
Most of the population of the world is still under-developed in terms of modern commerce. Most of Africa, China, Southeast Asia and much of Latin America is rural and has not entered the modern commercial era. The population is still growing with outmoded anticipation of high mortality and early age productivity. Most of the rest of the world is facing declining population.
The U.S. saw a massive baby boom after WWII associated with victory and widespread optimism. Their offspring, the hippies, were generally optimist about their personal lives (but not their Armageddon worldviews). Europe after the war was the first region to experience a decline in population, which became more rapid as the grim reality of living in a cradle to grave socialist society became more entrenched. Japan experienced the same population decline as the Japanese realized their much loved traditional society was gone, never to return. The USSR and Russia experienced the most dramatic population decline as the society realized that a post- communist society was not really post- communist and had no future at all.
On the whole planet only one society that is a modern commercial society has a growing population, only one, and that is Israel. Israel is the great new prosperous state that is a miracle for the Jews who were in exile for two millennia. The Jews, who have close and extensive friendship networks from being in the army together, are strongly optimistic about their country and their individual lives.
America, which was always an optimistic country because of its singular constitution and its special vision of hope for the world, has lost that positive vision. It is mired in the grim world of hate and ethnic division that goes by the name of ‘wokiness.’ The newborns every year, which I formerly could count on being 4 million boys and girls, is now down to 3.6 million and has been declining for decades. Americans no longer see a hopeful future, especially the urban woke. This is what we learned in the recent Covid cataclysm:
- “The percentage of births to New York City residents that occurred outside of the city increased for all months from March through November, the report found. Non-Hispanic White residents were 2.5 times more likely to give birth outside of the city in April and May 2020 than in the same period a year earlier.”
That says it all. The wokies have brought us despair. The rest of Americans are more upbeat.
I see in my grandchildren, as they graduate from college, no vision for the future, no hope and a future life without meaning. For them, America is lost.