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Loading... What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disasterby Jonathan V. Last
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  Duffyevsky | Aug 19, 2022 |    ) resoundingjoy | Jan 1, 2021 |  ) VGAHarris | Jan 19, 2015 |
Even before Paul Ehrlich's 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, our enlightened classes have been telling us that growing populations are bad—bad for women, bad for the economy, bad for the environment. Now comes Jonathan Last to tell us that they got it all wrong: The real threat to our future, says Mr. Last, is that we are not having enough babies. His argument in What to Expect When No One's Expecting is summed up in three broad propositions. First, that "there is something about modernity itself that tends toward fewer children." Second, that most attempts to reverse this trend have failed. And third, that unless something changes soon, the United States will face what Japan and Europe are already seeing: shrinking, graying populations that will affect everything from armies and real-estate prices to entitlements and entrepreneurship.
Look around you and think for a minute: Is America too crowded? For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that's busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. It's all bunk. The "population bomb" never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we've been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The world's population will peak, and then begin shrinking, within the next fifty years. In some countries, it's already started. Japan, for instance, will be half its current size by the end of the century. In Italy, there are already more deaths than births every year. China's One-Child Policy has left that country without enough women to marry its men, not enough young people to support the country's elderly, and an impending population contraction that has the ruling class terrified. And all of this is coming to America, too. In fact, it's already here. Middle-class Americans have their own, informal one-child policy these days. And an alarming number of upscale professionals don't even go that far--they have dogs, not kids. In fact, if it weren't for the wave of immigration we experienced over the last thirty years, the United States would be on the verge of shrinking, too. What happened? Everything about modern life--from Bugaboo strollers to insane college tuition to government regulations--has pushed Americans in a single direction, making it harder to have children. And making the people who do still want to have children feel like second-class citizens. What to Expect When No One's Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world. Because if America wants to continue to lead the world, we need to have more babies. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)304.60973Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Factors affecting social behavior PopulationLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.68)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
2
From the pill and abortion, to the Welfare state urbanization, to secularization and economics, so many factors of the modern world conspire against family life and procreation. It's documented here both how these factors relate, and how they spell something very near to doom, if current trends persist.
A highlight of the book, as an Orthodox Christian reader, was his focus in the final chapter on the country of Georgia as one of the sole, recent success stories, in terms of fertility, thanks to the country's piety and Patriarch Ilia's promise to personalize baptize all children born to families who already have at least two kids. Evangelization isn't touted as a possible policy prescription, but it can be one!
In examining potential policy changes the one thing I would have been interested to see discussed more directly is propaganda. There are mentions of it somewhat tangentially -- like Singapore's "two is enough" slogan changing to "have three or more" -- and the failure of such campaigns to increase fertility (though they worked, in conjunction with discouraging policies, at lowering it.) Could white propaganda help at encouraging it? (