CHAPTER 1 The Paradox of Borders, Diapers, and Golf CoursesRead more at location 415
America has more golf courses than it has McDonalds.Read more at location 417
It’s a story of 40 million retiring baby boomers looking for a place to take a walk and exercise.Read more at location 418
Japanese retailers sell more adult diapers than baby diapers.Read more at location 420
As countries grow rich, their birthrates fall and the average age of the population climbs.Read more at location 422
In order to keep up a lofty standard of living, citizens need workers to serve them,Read more at location 423
This requires an influx of new workers, which means opening up the gates to more immigrants.Read more at location 424
Unless a country has strong cultural and civic institutions, new immigrants can splinter the dominant culture.Read more at location 425
Thus countries face either (1) declining relative wealth or (2) fraying cultural fabric.Read more at location 426
Prosperous nations cannot enjoy their prosperity without becoming multicultural. But if they become multicultural, they struggle to pursue unified, national goals.Read more at location 426
Biologist Paul Ehrlich, formerly an acclaimed expert in butterflies, showed up on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show twenty times, urging “zero population growth,” and forecasting that during the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people would starve to death.Read more at location 437
Donald Duck helps explain that if families have too many children, the mothers will be “tired and cross . . . the children will be sickly and unhappy,”Read more at location 439
The baby boom fizzled out and, after 1960 (coinciding with the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the birth control pill), US birthrates began a long and powerful 47 percent plunge.Read more at location 444
Likewise, it would be wrong simply to credit the birth control pill. More convenient reproductive technologies merely made it easier for parents to enact their childbearing choices; the technologies did not actually make the choices.Read more at location 448
My historical findings suggest that the trend toward fewer babies shows up almost whenever a large middle class begins to form in a society.Read more at location 451
No one has recorded “Where Have All the Dogs and Cats Gone?” because the number of pets owned by Americans has soared higher over the past fifty-five years, just as the baby birthrate has plunged. We have about 75.5 million children in the United States but 90 million cats, 75 million dogs, and 170 million freshwater fish.Read more at location 456
A few blocks from my house, I can find stores that specialize in dog bathing and grooming, both the do-it-yourself type and the hired guns equipped, of course, with customized blow-dryers and the promise to return the pooch smelling of mango, coconut, or lemon verbena shampoo. It is more difficult to find someone else to wash and dry your kid’s hair.Read more at location 461
We have developed a relatively greater preference for pets and a lesser preference for children.Read more at location 468
The average American woman is likely to give birth to 1.89 babies. That is below the 2.1 replacement rate for a stable population (which takes into account disease, infant mortality, war, etc.).Read more at location 469
Remember, this skimpy 1.89 data point comes at a time when surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, and other even more heroic fertility treatments allow millions of infertile couples to have children.Read more at location 471
Though overall fertility rates fall when countries grow wealthier, upper and middle-income earners are especially slow to reproduce. US families earning over $75,000 per year have fewer than fifty-five babies per thousand women.Read more at location 476
Apparently, attaining a college degree is a wonderful contraceptive. College-educated American mothers average only 1.6 babies, not much higher than China’s (noncollege) 1.54. The difference is that until 2015 China’s government dictated an official one-child limit, whereas in America many couples choose to impose their own one-child policy on themselves.Read more at location 478
Why would Americans in their childbearing years choose not to have children? Ask any parent! Children are messy, loud, worrisome, and expensive.Read more at location 481
Veterinary visits cost dog owners an average $378 per year.3 The cost of medical care for a child is $990.4 The cost of personal dog training might reach $50 per hour. The cost of a four-year college can exceed a quarter of a million dollars.Read more at location 482
Of course, children can provide moments of rapturous love and affection. And, of course, children might take care of a parent in old age or in sickness, in a way that birds, cats, and dogs might not.Read more at location 486
Yet children have always been messy, loud, and expensive.Read more at location 488
For most Western European countries, fertility rates are even skimpier than for the United States: for example, 1.4 for Germany and 1.39 for Italy.Read more at location 493
But Italy does not rank first among shrinking lands. Japan’s fertility rate dropped to 1.3,Read more at location 497
The Japan Family Planning Association reported that 21.6 percent of men in their late twenties “have no interest in” or “despise” sex.Read more at location 499
While Japan’s Millennials prioritize texts over sex, the old people are hanging around longer.Read more at location 501
Why the choice? Here’s the two-word answer: Blame prosperity.Read more at location 509
In poorer centuries, children served as crucial working assets who were needed to help harvest and thresh grain, lug sacks of wheat, or in the nineteenth century crawl on their bellies into coal mines.Read more at location 511
a family with many children would have a more diversified portfolio of human assets. One child might be very smart and help ensure that the parents were not cheated when they measured sacks at the trading station. Another child might prove very strongRead more at location 513
A fourth child might win a wrestling contest and grow up to become Abraham LincolnRead more at location 516
In the modern world, we think of children as needing insurance, in case something goes wrong. In earlier times, children were the insurance.Read more at location 520
Often a young man who played one role in his family’s portfolio would marry a young woman who played an opposite role in another. Together they would create a more talented, durable, and diverse family. Much of romantic literature is based on a clash of opposites who “meet cute.”Read more at location 522
Marriage was supposed to quickly lead to a baby carriage. If a young couple decided not to bear children after twelve months, rumormongers would whisper of health defects or a bad sign from the gods.Read more at location 530
If a traditional society was to survive storms, drought, invaders, and horrendous infant mortality, it needed many newborn babies.Read more at location 536
In ancient cultures, more children implied more virility and higher status.Read more at location 542
higher-ranking male could also expect a greater proportion of his children to survive infancy,Read more at location 550
In Ireland, one in twelve may be descendants of a fifth-century warlord known as Niall of the Nine Hostages.Read more at location 554
In traditional societies, men would be expected to protect their family. A man who could not shield his wife or wives would be emasculated, symbolically if not literally.Read more at location 558
A fascinating study of 635 men and 1,169 children who had attended college in New Mexico showed that fathers spend much more time and money on genetically linked children than on stepchildrenRead more at location 561
The idea of a portfolio of children and the sexual liberties given only to men clearly show a gender bias. Traditional societies discriminated against females, through inheritance, investment in education,Read more at location 565
A desire for sons can lead to all sorts of dastardly behavior.Read more at location 569
In China, after the communist government imposed a one-child policy in 1979, many families simply aborted female fetuses, while others committed infanticide after the girls were born.Read more at location 569
Traditional Hindu culture honors boys above girls, since the religion requires that parents be buried by a son.Read more at location 571
“by a son a man obtains victory over all people; by a son’s son he enjoys immortality; and afterwards by the son of a grandson he reaches the solar abode . . . the son delivers the father from hell.”Read more at location 573
As societies grow relatively richer, children stop looking like nifty manual workers and obedient field hands and instead begin to resemble luxury goods, much like pets or handbags.Read more at location 576
in 1900 a hardworking Alaskan trapper might have wanted six hairy, well-insulated malamutes to haul his sled through the snow. Today a resident of modern Anchorage might be happy with one Pomeranian to sit on his lap while he watches Netflix in his toasty warm home, heated by natural gas pipelines.Read more at location 578
Whereas traditional societies might have gauged a man’s status by counting his children, elite status today may come from counting the number of Rolex watchesRead more at location 581
Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker asserted that parents see a trade-off between the quantity of children and the quality of children.Read more at location 583
Middle- and upper-income parents expect their children to achieve much. That requires parents to invest time and money in their offspring.Read more at location 584
From all around the world, data show that more education has meant fewer children, perhaps because more educated people feel more comfortable with the Beckerian “opportunity cost” choice framework.Read more at location 593
“lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, of art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility.”Read more at location 597
My point is not that a lower birthrate always dooms a nation. My point is that a lower birthrate can come from economic and political success, which then creates new, sometimes insurmountable obstacles to that nation continuing its reign.Read more at location 653
POST-NAPOLEONIC FRANCE AND VICTORIAN ENGLAND AND THE RULE OF TWENTY-FIVERead more at location 696
Life expectancy has jumped from roughly forty-seven years of age in 1900 to about eighty today in most industrialized countries.Read more at location 739
Here’s another twist that comes from longer lives: the mere fact of living longer might actually induce people to have fewer children. Consider: if you know you are going to live to be ninety, you might feel less pressure to marry early,Read more at location 742
The age of first marriage in the United States has climbed in the past century, from roughly twenty-one years to almost twenty-seven years.Read more at location 744
At age twenty-seven, the chance of a female getting pregnant begins to slip, so that a twenty-seven- to twenty-nine-year-old has a significantly smaller chance of becoming pregnant than a nineteen- to twenty-six-year-old.Read more at location 745
course, many women give birth without wearing a wedding ring or even living with the father. But if we look at the average age of an American woman bearing a first child, that number leaped from 21.4 years in 1970 to 25 years in 2006. And waiting is not a stupid decision. A study by Amalia Miller at the University of Virginia showed that not having babies pays, at least in the short term. For every year an American woman delays childbirth, she earns 9 percent more in the workplace as she gains more experience and enhances her nonchildrearing skills.Read more at location 751
In sum, rising life spans and rising incomes dampen the tendency to bear more children.Read more at location 755
Here’s the question in this chapter: “Do the lower birthrate and aging of the general population lead to more immigrants, which leads to either a breakdown or a downward shift in the spirit of community?” If the answer is yes, that does not imply that the policy response should be to block immigrants from landing at airports or docking at ports. As we shall see in the Conclusion, the answer is in building better community institutions and more durable traditions.Read more at location 789
But when we look into the data, the three fastest-growing jobs are (1) personal care aide, (2) home health aide, and (3) interpreter/translator.42 What do we know about these jobs?Read more at location 795
