Part of that comes from the regulatory impact on the cost of schooling and health care. A big part of it comes from gradually increasing costs in time of raising kids… the age at which people are expected and generally permitted to fend for themselves has increased over the years, meaning that our own effective lifetimes are shorter and more of that lifetime is taken up by raising kids if we in fact raise them.

So Americans, particularly middle-class Americans, are discouraged from having kids by economic factors, even though they are wealthier than their more prolific forbears.

There is little pressure now on people in western societies to have children. I think this means that people who do not want children are now less likely to have them (just at people who want large families can now afford them more easily). I think that’s probably a good thing, though it invariably seems bad if you look only at population averages.

I agree with Spengler’s first two, but not the blindly obedient to religious authority, at least not in my protestant world. Don’t know about evangelicals, catholics, etc.

BTW my personal experience is pretty much like Spengler describes. I’m religious and I have five kids.

I can’t remember the last time I disagreed with you, but I don’t think we have enough data to say “the best explanation for demographic collapse is the economic squeeze caused by socialism.” China has been essentially socialist for a long time, yet the biggest explanation of their birth rates is state policy. Emerging market birth rates would be more likely the result of economic development, ie less farm labor needed. Previous posts went into more detail on that.

At the very least, that’s 4 variables. I would need more convincing to conclude that low birth rates in Eastern Europe are the result of the economic costs of socialism rather than state ideology replacing religion, although I hadn’t thought of your point and agree that it had an impact, to a point.

That was a battle us social conservatives fought and lost back in the early 1970′s when no-fault divorce laws were being passed as part of the feminist movement. I would certainly like to reopen the debate (and now that women are being abandoned for trophy wives, and men are being left by their wives and hit up child support, I think we might win).

I say “us social conservatives” even though my mother was one of the social liberal taking advantage of the liberalized divorce laws!

In any case, IMO, the definition of a social conservatives is someone who agrees with the following statement: Once you bring a child into the world, the interests of that child come before your own interests.

Which means that over the long term, in an environment where death during childhood is almost unheard of (such as ours), people who would have a child in these circumstances will outbreed those would would not.

Is that going to lead to a population capable of expanding into space? Of improving medical technology to conquer old age or simply to keep pace with evolving drug-resistant microbes?

People who are able to design the craft, the habitats, the fusion engines and life systems and so on still have several years of school ahead of them at age 19, and will blow any realistic chance of learning how to do such things if they marry and have children at that age. So will those able to finance the operations, those able to pilot the craft, those able to do anything at all crucial to our culture’s continued advancement. Those capable of researching or treating diseases are in even worse straits, evolutionarily speaking. They can’t marry and have kids until they’re about 30 or so if they want any shot at practicing such careers.

Those capable of taking orders at orbital McDonalds’ (assuming the others ever get around to building and launching the habitats that they operate in), however, can marry and have children as soon as they come of age, if not before, with much smaller opportunity costs.

What to do? Trying to stop anyone from breeding will quickly turn this culture into one that any thinking and capable person will flee from as fast as they can. So will trying to force anyone to breed. However, it will be helpful overall, and more conducive to individual liberty, to shorten childhood and K-12 education, remove the blatant stalling that takes place during this period, and allow people to advance through the curriculum as fast as their abilities allow instead of trying to group them by “social development” or other such nonsense, so that those capable of further education can complete that education without eating up half of their childbearing years and leaving us with hardly any children to carry on the difficult work of future generations.

Gay marriage is lost in the noise. Anyone who would be part of such a marriage is not a suitable candidate for a happy heterosexual marriage in any event. People are putting off marriage and childbirth for a reason, and addressing that reason is the best way to go here to get more smart babies that we can depend on for our civilization’s future. And, if we address those reasons, smart evangelicals can get educations and follow God’s command to be fruitful and multiply without any conflict.

Don’t be silly. He was widely worshipped in various Communist countries. All that human sacrifice was for a reason and Europe itself makes reqular offerings of infants. The continuing worship of Baal-Moloch in academia is something of a mystery to me.

“Divorce among heterosexual evangelicals may cause a lot more problems than homosexual couples.”

I am sure that virtually all evangelicals would agree. It is a matter they take quite seriously. The concept of of charter marriages is, after all, an evangelical concept. That however, says nothing about the further harm to society they believe will occur if the institution of marriage is weakened even further by gay marriage.

Social conservatives of all stripes deserve credit for predicting that divorce and non-traditional families would prove bad for children and society at large. The same people who now proclaim that gay marriage won’t cause any problem are the same people who said back in the 60′s and 70′s that easy divorce wouldn’t cause problems. They were wrong then, why aren’t they wrong now?

I personally support gay-civil unions at the very least but having witnessed the ongoing wreckage that we have inflicted on the last two generations of children I am VERY sympathetic to those who argue the other way.

The problem here is something that goes back to Lex’s original post. Religious people’s morality, and especially the morality of the traditionalist, is grounded in the needs of other people on an immediate and personal level. It is about Person A’s personal interaction with person B, not Person A’s interaction with an abstract class composed of large numbers of individuals. Such people have children and sacrifice to take care of them.

Very few secularist have such a morality. Their morality is largely attached to abstract groups. They bitterly resent any implication that they have obligations or responsibilities to specific individuals on a level that would justify social or political intervention if they fail to fulfill them. Children are an abstract class, not individuals. Such people either won’t have children because they see no need to personally contribute to the next generation or if they do have children will view them as more societies responsibility than their own.

Traditions have the virtue of having evolved over time. At least at some point in the past they worked well. We jettison then casually at our peril.

The main reason this is even relevant is that they, as a group, are nearing majority status. This is owning in part to higher birth rates than other groups, and in smaller part to religious conversion. This means their politics will tend to drive politics as a whole in this country, for good or for ill.

Why the higher birthrate? Here are a few factors:
- desire to start families; seeing family as a good thing
- making “having children” a priority over “accumulating stuff”
- religious commands to procreate
- the availability of financial assistance from church (directly or indirectly)
- significantly less likely to have abortions

With one couple I know, he just turned 19 and she’s not much older. They’ve been married about a year and have a baby on the way (the baby shower ends in 10 minutes.) He makes perhaps $10/hour and she makes even less. Other couples in the same circumstance might never have tried to have a kid or opted for abortion in the case of accidental pregnancy. But, their church and their friends are helping them cover some of their costs, and abortion is simply out of the question. This means they’re going to have a child in a circumstance where others would not.

In aggregate: Divorce among heterosexual evangelicals may cause a lot more problems than homosexual couples. Not sure.

So maybe evangelicals should prioritize and go after some of the biggest things first.

Christians say one thing and behave another way. No one is perfect. It has probably always been this way. But it may be getting a little bit worse recently.

The interesting questeion to me is: If you control for all these factors…and an inter-society variance is still left..that variance might be considered the “zeitgeist factor” reflecting societal pessimism and inability to think beyond a single generation as argued by Spengler. How much of the total variance is accounted for by the zeitgeist factor, as opposed to the more tangible things?