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The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don't Have Enough Babies?

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Wattenberg provides sufficient evidence that society will suffer with current trends to limit our offspring. Just one issue for your consideration..what do you think will happen to social security without enough people in subsequent generations to pay for it...read his thoughts on it! Interesting read!

Ben Wattenberg has bucked many a piece of conventional wisdom in his own working life, and in doing so provided refreshingly accurate information about social realities. When he wrote this work about the ' birth dearth' many pooh-poohed him but now the trends which even then were clearly visible in the Industrial world have extended themselves to the third world. And if the birth- dearth is more apparent in Europe where replacement - level fertility is not in sight among major nations now too Japan, South Korea and even China are at below replacement- levels.
Wattenberg understood that the birth- dearth would present great social problems including that of younger and smaller generations demographically having to work harder to pay the massive government debts to social security programs for the retired. But the birth- dearth promises social and economic problems in additional ways including a problem of declining economic growth over-all. So far as we know economic expansions have historically been connected with expanding populations. We know no precedent for declining populations being accompanied by new economic growth.
Wattenberg is also sharply critical of the culture of narcissism of individual focusing on ' me and me alone' which he sees as responsible for the ' birth dearth ' in the West. Here he is not simply social scientist but moralist of the first order.

Wattenberg is (or was) a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. This association no doubt accounts for the thesis expounded in this book: that the Western industrialized nations are flirting with economic disaster and marginalization by maintaining too low birth rates. By Wattenberg's analysis, the resulting missing babies translate into "missing producers and consumer, soldiers and sailors, mothers and fathers".

To reverse this "dangerous trend" Wattenberg prescribes a number of remedies, including: provision of day care centers to help working mothers (which ought to be done in ANY case!), larger tax deductions for children and even cash bonuses for parents. Otherwise, he claims, we will be faced with a world "where the U.S. will no longer be the most important country in the world".

Any ecology-conscious person could be forgiven, however, for asking: "Yeah, Ben, but can this planet afford those extra numbers?"

The answer is a resounding 'NO!'. In terms of the impact on non-renewable resources, each child in a Western-developed nation consumes a disproportionate share with the U.S. offering the worst example: 6% of the world's population gobbling up 30% of the available resources in a given year. What Wattenberg is proposing (and largely for economic gains) is nothing short of lunacy in this light.

A far more rational take is afforded by Herman Daly, University of Maryland Professor of Ecological Economics, in his book 'Steady State Economics'. The problem is the concept of "growth" is bogus on its face. Only a congenital moron would continue to pander to unchecked growth (and the increased population that feeds it) in a finite, zero-sum environment or planet - in which artificial wealth is created by extracting resources necessarily impoverishes the remaining resource base. By "artificial wealth" I mean material or converted resources (other than food) that cannot sustain your life. They may window-dress it, like the latest i-pod, but they won't sustain it.

How hard can this be to grasp?

GDP itself is an absolute derelict, barren and useless indicator, as Daly has repeatedly noted.It says nothing at all about the real costs inflicted on us for our enhanced material wealth (which is always at the expense of the wealth of the natural environment). Thus - as Daly has noted, with each new material product - computer, cell phone, I-pod, plasma TV or SUV manufactured - we grow progressively poorer where it matters.

The recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, that our infrastructure (bridges, roads, water and sewer systems) are collapsing, punctuates this. While we have extolled the climb of the dubious "DOW" and its speculative wealth (all on paper, which can evaporate in one fell swoop, as we have seen) we allowed our roads, bridges, water mains and sewer systems to rot. The engineers now estimate a cost of $2.2 TRILLION to just bring those system to an acceptable state of repair. That is all money we need to subtract from the illustrious GDP. Doing that makes us much poorer than we believe ourselves to be!

Most Americans, brainwashed by consumer capitalism and its hacks, cannot get this fundamental fact through their craniums, hence come to expect yearly growth as some kind of natural law or basic physical principle. It isn't! Daly's point is that the real sane option is steady-state growth.

Getting back to `GDP' - it is what we call a false economic indicator.

The GDP is supposed to measure the total production and consumption of goods and services in the United States. But the numbers that make up the Gross Domestic Product by and large only capture the monetary transactions we can put a dollar value on. Almost everything else is left out: old growth forests that maintain cooling, and acts as CO2 repositories, watersheds, animal habitats, e.g. the Everglades, and costs of infrastructure maintenance.

Ignoring these "externalities" (including the impact of growing populations and their demand for food, consumables) leads us into a fool's paradise where we come to believe things are much better than the GDP numbers show. Similarly with energy, conveniently ignoring externalities of cost and demand leads too many to envisage a pie-eyed future of never-ending growth and ever more intense energy consumption.

All this translates inexorably into "growth" and woe betide you if you dare intimate (as Prof. Daly has done) that a zero or negative growth index may be a lot better for humans, if they hope not to outstrip their resource support base.

Daly has noted that the concept of the GDP was developed to help steer the US economy out of the Great Depression, and through World War Two. It was for another time and place, and is no longer relevant to this time and place. It needs to be dunned and ditched in favor of the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare.

If one then adopts the latter, one quickly sees that growing human population translates into poverty for most humans, not wealth and certainly not "importance".

Another much saner alternative to this book is Aurelio Peccei's `One Hundred Pages for the Future' . Peccei makes a passionate plea for humans to notch their numbers down to replacement levels or lower since they exceeded the Earth's ability to support them. (Part 1: `The Ascent and Decline of Humankind'). Peccei refers to an enormous supplemental population - one that exists beyond the ability of additional resources, energy as a "human bomb threatening the planet".

Meanwhile, the late noted science writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov- in various essays written over decades- has also warned of similar constraints on humanity's use of resources, particularly in terms of how population growth impinges on finite resources and sets limits to growth. Asimov was probably also the first to use the term "carrying capacity" which he estimated to be 3 billion humans for this limited world.

By contrast, Wattenberg's book essentially tosses the very concept of carrying capacity out the window.

More recently, in an article appearing in `Physics Today' (July, 2004 issue): `Thoughts on Long-Term Energy Supplies: Scientists and the Silent Lie', Albert Bartlett pinpoints the failure to name human population growth as a major cause of our energy and resource problems.

Bartlett avers that "their (scientists') general reticence stems from the fact that it is politically incorrect or unpopular to argue for stabilization of population - at least in the U.S. Or perhaps scientists are uncomfortable stepping outside their specialized areas of expertise".

Whatever the reason, Bartlett argues it is equivalent to perpetuating a "silent lie", a term derived from a Mark Twain quote:

"Almost all lies are acts, and speech has no part in them...I am speaking of the lie of silent assertion: we can tell it without saying a word."

Indeed, it occurs each time a rosy economic forecast is given, and energy scientists - for example, withhold comment rather than strongly vocalize how these forecasts are adrift from reality since they take no account of "externalities" or "external costs".

Make no mistake here, that Wattenberg's effort only remotely appears to be plausible if one dispenses with all external costs of increasing human population, including the astounding added waste burden to be handled, and the billions of tons of carbon and other pollutants added each year.

Another aspect omitted from Wattenberg's consideration is this: Does he really, seriously believe, the rest of the world (especially in lesser developed nations) will sit idly by while the U.S. goes on a baby-making spree with the obvious intent of economic domination? Any fool would be able to see that family planning credibility would be lost and the world would breed as rapidly as the U.S. We would then face the terrifying prospect of the whole world going on a breeding free-for-all. Is this what we really want? I would really, seriously hope there are enough sane people left to say 'NO!'.

Most upsetting to me is the justification of such patent insanity to support Social Security. This is so egregious it hardly bears response, but given the extent to which our public discourse has been debased in the Bush years, one can make no assumptions. Let me just say then that the response of increasing numbers to provide more workers to support Social Security is insane and egregious.

First, the 1983 Social Security reforms(by raising the FICA rate to 6.2%) was explicitly to cover the coming boomer onslaught. Thus, the solution to the greater number of retirees was *already provided* 25 years ago! That the Social Security funds have dwindled is not because there was no solution or no extra money put in, but because the Social Security monies were never sequestered from the general revenues! (A terrible choice made by LBJ in the 1960s, in order to use SS monies to help pay for VietNam and reduce the size of the deficits)

The lazy, callous and stupid derived a high "chuckle factor" from Gore's "lockbox" recommendations in 2000 but he had exactly the right idea! Indeed, the Budget Enforcement Act of 1992 expressly provided for a Social Security lockbox, but it has never been enforced. Another hollow law. What Gore ought to have done is referenced this law, and called for its rigorous enforcing.

Another canard, circulated by right wingers, is that there is some "seismic gap" between what has been promised to retirees and what government can pay. This is more twaddle peddled by the likes of neo-liberals like Robert Samuelson. In fact there are three things that can be done immediately to sustain Social Security - despite its pillaging by congress - and which require no draconian solution such as a massive population increase:

1) Enforce the "lockbox" sequestration of monies articulated by the Budgetn Enforcement act of 1992

2) Gradually raise the maximum earnings base that determines the amount of earnigns taxed (under FICA) and credited for benefits. While many insist this shouldn't be done because "people earning over $100,000 a year don't use Social Security" - there is ample evidence that just as many or more DO use it. So, it is only fair that they pay a proportionately higher FICA rate.

3) Advance slight incremental age increases in order to receive full benefits. Since the average American lives to 75 today, it is reasonable to up the maximum benefit age to 70, certainly for all those born after 1960.

Again, I address all these precisely because so many today exploit the alleged "bankruptcy" of social security to justify inflating the U.S. population by enhanced birth rate or allowing many more immigrants into the country. I want to show this is a non sequitur, and unless a lockbox solution is ultimately implemented, we can import the whole of India as workers and SS will still be in parlous straits - because congress critters will keep on raiding it. Why? Because they can!

People of the Western democracies and especially the U.S., ought to be as offended by Wattenberg's specious effort as any third-worlder. This is because it reduces the individual to a simple consuming unit or worse, cannon fodder. In the first case, all ecologically aware people know that consumption can't occur in a vacuum. Consumption means resource depletion and thus must be limited by ecological constraints if we wish to bequeath a liveable world to our offspring. Thus, it is better to learn to live with less than condemn our children to a poisoned hell.

In the end, Wattenberg's book lacks two key ingredients I look for in most nonfiction works: credibility and a sense of responsibility to the global human family. My advice to would-be readers? Save your money and mental effort, it just isn't worth the trouble.