Pandagon is still having a spirited zero population growth discussion, this time in a different post where there's a whole lotta pearls being clutched because conservatives might "misconstrue" (read: accurately describe) efforts to limit the size of families as a new form of eugenics.
That's not the entire argument, of course, but a fair number of commenters are concerned about the racist (or not) overtones of Amanda Marcotte's suggestions that we stop middle class white women from breeding. The debate gets complicated--who consumes more, the poor Mexican family or the middle class white family?--and that's pretty much where the racism comes in. IMO, if you want ZPG then stop dragging race into it and just advocate ZPG for everybody.
Some of the comments are chilling, but I was most curious how Amanda proposed we go from 6.5 billion people to 1.5 billion and what the time frame was for this population decline. I still haven't seen any answer to that, and I wasn't being snarky when I asked it, either. It seems to me that unless we're going to start offing people, there's no way to eliminate 3/4 of the Earth's population in an short enough time frame (say, 100 years).
That ZPG debate came to mind when I was reading Chuck Colson's column on the fertility rates between religious people and secular people.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, social scientist Arthur Brooks notes that if you pick 100 adults out of the population who attend their houses of worship nearly every week, they would have 223 children among them. But among 100 people who attend religious services less than once a year—or never—you would find 158 kids. That's a 41 percent fertility gap between religious and secular people.
Even worse—if you are a secularist—religious people who identify themselves as politically "conservative" or "very conservative" are having, on average, an astonishing 78 percent more kids than secular liberals, Brooks writes.
This is significant, because kids tend to grow up to worship the way their parents do. In a generation or two, we are going to have a bumper crop of conservative citizens. Candidates who appeal to Christians will win more elections simply because of demographics.
Colson was talking specifically about candidates who discuss their religious faith and the impact religion has on national elections. I've seen debates like this before from an atheistic perspective over at Echidne's site. The discussion there was how atheists can overcome negative stereotypes and appeal to religious voters. The argument was that toning down the "you might as well worship spaghetti" nastiness might gain respect for that crowd, and I agree with that. For people who talk a lot about tolerance, there are times that tolerance is hard to find on the Left.
But I find Colson's point about believers outspawning nonbelievers to be quite significant. Reading Amanda's posts about the need for voluntary childlessness (and her obvious ignorance about why people have multiple children) made me realize that there are some areas you can't understand unless you've experienced it. In other words, people who advocate voluntary childlessness will have success among those who agree with them, but will ultimately fail because they dismiss the societal reasons people have kids.
In a day and age when birth control is readily available and relatively cheap, most people make an active decision to have children. This isn't saying there aren't a lot of "oopsies" out there (I've seen figures that 60% of pregnancies are unplanned), but that the parents knew they wanted children...they just hadn't planned for it right then.
As I've said before, people typically have multiple kids not because of some societal pressure on them to have more (particularly the nonsense about white women being pressured to have more kids). They have multiple kids because they like kids. Now, I'm not suggesting that people who only have one child don't like children. But I am saying that every large family I see has so many children because they like having kids around. They are the parents that spend time with their kids and have lots of toys, games, books, and art supplies. In other words, these people who have big families (and anyone with four or more children qualifies these days) enjoy being around kids.
This is why the ZPG people will fail, I think. It's hard to get people to give up something they enjoy, from television to potato chips and, yes, to having kids. People in First World countries have children not because they need the tax credits or child labor but because they believe children have intrinsic worth far beyond any monetary value. And as the stats from Colson's column show, this difference in values will have an impact on politics and society because the people not having children will become a tinier and tinier minority. It's really that simple.
|